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To paraphrase part of TFA 'We can save money by developing X with components from Y', this is why it's cheaper to now spend money on Y.

Versus a clean-sheet design.

Combine that with SpaceX's largely integrated workflow, with minimal external contractors, and you have extreme problems for traditional aerospace to meet the costs.

Contracts are granted not on the basis of what would make the overall system cheaper, but electoral politics.

And if SpaceX gets even limited reusability working - http://phys.org/news/2012-11-spacex-story-reuseable-grasshopper-rocket.html - the price crashes further.

I had more than one link. Here's another. A cursory google search reveals a ton of info from respected scientists, the vast majority of whom agree climate change is real. The only people who don't are deluded conservatives and oil companies, and I am getting sick and tired of treating them as serious voices instead of the petulant reality denying fools they are. Life IS about making the right tradeoffs, and I refuse to trade human life for mindless exploitation of the environment.

It isn't a religious faith. Its science. Its writing on the wall, and serious people are finally starting to read it. The people polluting the Earth are already having an impact on our weather patterns - one that has claimed lives.

WRONG

It's NOT science.

Science WELCOMES attempts at falsification. It does NOT label doubters "denialists" or "heretics".

So, what do you call people who reject the heliocentric solar system?

It isn't a religious faith. Its science. Its writing on the wall, and serious people are finally starting to read it. The people polluting the Earth are already having an impact on our weather patterns - one that has claimed lives.

WRONG

It's NOT science.

Science WELCOMES attempts at falsification. It does NOT label doubters "denialists" or "heretics".

Read this.. You might learn something. Though I doubt it.

It isn't a religious faith. Its science. Its writing on the wall, and serious people are finally starting to read it. The people polluting the Earth are already having an impact on our weather patterns - one that has claimed lives.

Sorry, friend. Alcohol wrecks both. You can see it in long time alcoholics, they're slower, make worse decisions and are generally more aggressive. Long time potheads are sometimes lazier but generally more pleasant to be around.

But don't take my word for it. http://phys.org/news157280425.html

Here is just a spattering of interesting reading.

• Kaku on dimensions. N.B. You, good sir, have corrected someone on the Internet. The formulas have not been worked out for m-theory (10+ dimensions).
• Hameroff on the possibility of microtubules being a substrate for consciousness.
• Is everything made of mini black holes?
• Occultists meditating on subatomic particles in the late 19th century

Yeah, here are some more interesting topics:

Bigfoot: the new evidence

Is the Tooth Fairy real?

Angels: harness their power and release your potential

Here is just a spattering of interesting reading.

• Kaku on dimensions. N.B. You, good sir, have corrected someone on the Internet. The formulas have not been worked out for m-theory (10+ dimensions).
• Hameroff on the possibility of microtubules being a substrate for consciousness.
• Is everything made of mini black holes?
• Occultists meditating on subatomic particles in the late 19th century

We've only begun to scratch the surface of consciousness because of the Enlightenment bias. That the frontiers of science are peculiarly reminiscent of ancient wisdom does not mean I would blindly do away with the scientific method. In fact, scientific breakthroughs are often a marriage of inexplicable insight and subsequent deductive analysis.

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand. -Frank Herbert

Most gasoline powered cars emit very little soot. Diesels (particularly the redneck black smokers purposely de-tuned to produce more smoke) emit much more.

But all vehicles generate brake dust and tire dust. Over the years the brake vendors have been trying to make the stuff less toxic, but since you "live next to a main road and the soot/dust is horrendous" you can expect a higher incidence of certain illnesses in your family. If police cars and emergency vehicles use the road a lot, that's even worse, because they are usually allowed to use high-performance brake pads that are loaded with known carcinogens.

Anyone with an open mind will see that God is really the only rational, logical explanation.

If there is something out there that caused our universe to exist, I don't see any reason why it should even remotely resemble any of the many gods humans believe in or have believed in through the ages. If it is one of them, it could for instance be Ra, who created himself and went on creating others by masturbating. Or Eurynome, who arose naked from chaos, parted sea from sky so she could dance on the waves, generated a serpent from the north wind and mated with it, and laid an egg that hatched everything that exists. Those stories strike me as highly improbable, though, and so does every other creation story I'm aware of. The only rational, logical position for me is that all human religions are most likely fantasies with no relation at all to the real origins of our universe, and if one of them isn't we have no way to decide which one. Perhaps the physicists who proposed a method to determine if the universe is a simulation have taken the first step in a direction that may actually give us answers instead of beliefs.

If you disagree, I would encourage you to read some actual works on the topic - maybe something by Robert Spitzer.

Which Robert Spitzer? There are several.

Most processed food HFCS is 42% fructose.

But the "sugary drinks" under discussion are 55% to 45%, or even worse if reports like this are correct.

Nice. Never heard of these advances: http://phys.org/news93882787.html
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-36-6-1014
http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/science/vol315/315-47.pdf
http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.1177 (see last page in this paper for transmission spectra)
Last thing i heard of was NIR. And I'm still not convinced these approaches could be used for broad spectrum applications, like across the whole visible spectrum. That you use only blue and red light seems to suggest that as well. :)
Also, the Science and arxiv articles suggest it can only be used for cases where you can crank the illumination way up to compensate for metamaterial losses (like, in microscopy).

more toilet humor ... you mean potty talk? /sorry

"It's just simply more economical to dig a hole in the ground"
until the next guy digs one up.. seriously. had the same problem in my yard with the dog. burying it worked for a while, but eventually ran out of new places to dig. buried shit stays around for a while. eventually had to get one of these: http://www.energystead.com/doogies-dooley-pet-waste-composter-2000/

"people have reasonable levels of phobias'
it's not like they have signs advertising worms. looks like any other campsite throne.
http://phys.org/news/2012-10-turd-eating-worms-air-canadian-toilets.html

The article referenced by TFA says the worms are "... Eisenia fetida or red wiggler worms native to Europe imported from France and raised locally by Helene Beaumont ..." I'm currently being invaded by stink bugs imported from China, so I'm not particularly fond of folks proposing solutions that require importing non-native critters. Can't they find an indigenous turd-eating worm?

Why not use something a bit more durable and less expensive?

The reasoning behind my speculation is as follows:

(1) According to an article in Science News and others referenced from Slashdot, the Moon appears to be from 2 moons, both from the mantle, no major asteroid content, thus no mars-sized asteroid.

(2) If that is the case, then the best explanation is de Meijer's critical georeactor theory: calcium bergs blew up in the mantle. But...

(3) the de Meijer theory falls down based on the fact that the uranium/calcium bergs would create enough vapor pressure in going critical, that they wouldn't go sufficiently supercritical to blow out a major fraction of the moon, unless a *small* asteroid knocked one of them into the center of a group, or if another blast created shockwaves that compressed a collection of U-Ca bergs together. So it *does* require a small asteroid.

(4) If that is so, then due to the neutron bombardment, the U-Th, U-Pb, Pb-Pb dating of rocks is going to be off, but there will be great scatter in the estimated ages, and the event will be more recent than the dating indicates (2.3- billion years). But

(5) we have earth rocks that date older than that, too. So we should have evidence of the locations. That is, the Earth's crust should show evidence of the blast.

(6) Such a blast would shatter the Earth's crust, leaving rings of Kimberlites around the blast zone, that dated younger (because the rings are structural failures, and less contaminated by neutrons), while the center would date older, being more contaminated.

(7) Two such locations exist: the 850 mi-radius ring of Kimberlites around the Hudson Bay (search Canada kimberlite, and Greenland kimberlite), and the ring of Kimberlites around Vredefort that stretches from Brazil, through Africa, through North India, and into Austrailia.

(8) According to plate tectonics, both rings align correctly at the Permian extinction. Both rings have central rocks dating to about the age of the moon,

(9) At the site of the Vredefort blast, you have an area called the African Karoo. The lava sills (light gray in this picture) are excluded from a region which is heavy in Kimberlites, and indeed includes the city of Kimberly. The shape, size, and location of the excluded zone, at 230 ma ago, exactly matches the shape size and location of the Scotia plate, which remains volcanic to this day.

What this makes me think happened, is that an asteroid hit at an oblique angle at the location of a collection of georeactors, near the South Sandwich islands. The blast went supercritical, and blew out a close to half of the moon. most of the blast going back through the asteroid scar, but a lot of it going straight out. Crustally speaking, the blast destroyed whatever continent existed to the west.

The blast also sent shock waves through the earth. 1/3 of the way around the globe, another collection of georeactors was forced supercritical, creating a symmetrically round blast (the Hudson and its k

I originally thought you were right, but a quick google search produces this article:

http://phys.org/news5619.html

TL;DR: Freshwater ice floats higher in salt water because salt water is more dense.
"When freshwater ice melts in the ocean, it contributes a greater volume of melt water than it originally displaced."

Basically it was done with specially doped ruby emitters if I remember correct.

It was a pentacene-based organic material: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-maser-power-cold-demo-solid-state.html

Volcanics

This one actually explains it better: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-km-physicists-quantum-teleportation-distance.html No FTL communication but does give better security. Maybe better/faster compression to?

Came here to post this. Some quick searching reveals that the dark matter flux on Earth is also predicted to vary seasonally, with a peak in (northern) summer.

No Surprise: "Power minister promoted" Sure the engineers in charge who caused the blackout will be placed in key positions. (same as those bankers from Lehman/JPMorgan with big bonuses). News said it was like a "civil war" (one more objective achieved). Now only need to make provision for essential services: top officials and politicians homes need to have 24/7 power, (for security reasons, but no fear, the West already has solutions - ( http://phys.org/news145561984.html ), I looked for the original article on New Scientist (around 2004) but the Internet is a good place to hide) Small nuclear reactors buried underground will supply power to a small community. Not to worry, we will still be producing half-literate chaprasis and 'software people' to man the 'helpdesks' and do the dirty jobs.

Whoever Steve Sell's (Deputy Operations Lead for Entry, Descent, and Landing) boss is came up with it, or at least is going to end up taking credit/blame for it.

Hmm... I can't exactly recall any of my PCs having only a mouse. And no, I'm not just speaking of the 3DConnection device on this PC, or the graphics tablet on my home system. But the KEYBOARD. You can pretend to play an instrument on an iPad, but the only one you really have much chance at is something percussive, like a piano or drum... guitars just suck on touchscreens (well, at least for those who actually play guitar, they might be fine for the class of people who actually use a toy like Garage Band). All of which work better on a keyboard. Same with games.

Inherently. A capacitive touchscreen counts on the changes in capacitance to indicate a touch. It inherently takes time to measure that changing capacitor. A keyboard counts on a switch closure, much faster. Mice these days, they're using plused lasers, also much faster (at least potentially). This is critical for gaming or music -- gamers and musicians can notice delays of about 1ms.

Curiously, Microsoft is aware of the problem: http://phys.org/news/2012-03-microsoft-finger-1ms-touchscreen-video.html. Their claim is that most tablets are in the 50ms-100ms range these days. Fine for casual users, maybe. A horrible replacement for a mouse and keyboard, strings, a piano keyboard, drumsticks, etc.

You mean warming up lithium battery using the same power stored in the same battery? Isn't it a bit like trying to pull yourself out from swamp by pulling your own hair? The problem with cold exists right now, read http://phys.org/news184274463.html

Do you folks even realize IBM, TSMC, Global Foundries and Samsung announced their 450nm production back in March?

http://blog.timesunion.com/business/tool-makers-waiting-for-clarity-on-450mm-cost-sharing/53301/

Tool makers waiting for “clarity” on 450mm costs
March 28, 2012 at 10:45 am by Larry Rulison

The companies that supply the costly manufacturing equipment to computer chip factories – also known as “tool” makers – are waiting to get “greater clarity” about how much they will be asked to pay for the industry’s transition to using 450 millimeter silicon wafers.

The Times Union reported Tuesday that the tool makers will be asked to foot $450 million of the $1 billion price tag for the first phase of a 450mm transition program that will take place at the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

Deborah Geiger, a spokeswoman with SEMI, the San Jose, Calif. trade group that represents the tool makers, said the organization is hosting a forum on April 4 at the NanoCollege that will touch on the issue of how the 450mm program will be structured.

“We are not aware that definitive details and amounts have been established and publicly communicated,” Geiger said. “SEMI members are interested in greater clarity around the program structure and funding, including the cost share scenarios.”

The details included in the Times Union story were included in documents used by the Empire State Development Corp. in its approval of $300 million in funding for the NanoCollege for the 450mm program and another IBM program to shrink chip features nearly in half, down to 14 nanometers.

New York state is providing $150 million in cash and $50 million in cheap power, for $300 million total, toward both programs, which will be located inside the college’s new $365 million NanoFab Xtension building under construction on Washington Avenue Extension.

Five leading chip companies that make up what’s known as the Global 450mm Wafer Development and Deployment Consortium – Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and TSMC – will each contribute $75 million over five years toward the 450mm program.

Geiger says that a meeting is expected to be held in May in which suppliers to the G450C will be provided with a “more complete communication” on the 450mm program and how involved the tool makers will be.

Computer chips are currently made on wafers that are 300mm, or smaller. But the move to 450mm would save incredible amounts of money for manufacturers since output would roughly double with the larger size wafers.

All the players are in the game:

http://phys.org/news/2012-07-imec-nanophotonics-components-300mm-silicon.html

If they've found a way to desalinate water with much less energy, practically, that's huge.

TFA isn't wholly explicit but it actually talks about "efficiency" rather than "faster" as per the submission:

According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude [...] while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.

Though following TFA's source link to Water Online we come back to "2-3 orders of magnitude faster" and then reference to energy and cost:

In a new study, two materials scientists from MIT have shown in simulations that nanoporous graphene can filter salt from water at a rate that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than today’s best commercial desalination technology, reverse osmosis (RO). The researchers predict that graphene’s superior water permeability could lead to desalination techniques that require less energy and use smaller modules than RO technology, at a cost that will depend on future improvements in graphene fabrication methods.

To me that implies subby read that source article, which is a rather better article, leading me to suspect "anonymous reader" subby is from http://www.geekosystem.com/ It does kind of bug me a little when websites find someone else's story, don't contribute anything then go around plugging it like it's their scoop.

And BTW that Water Online source itself is lifted verbatim (stated as being with permission) from Phys.org.

I know nothing of the subject, so I actually bothered reading a more decent summary of the initial article, and some definition of reverse osmosis.
From wikipedia:

Reverse osmosis (RO) is a membrane-technology filtration method that removes many types of large molecules and ions from solutions by applying pressure to the solution when it is on one side of a selective membrane. The result is that the solute is retained on the pressurized side of the membrane and the pure solvent is allowed to pass to the other side.

and from phys.org:

In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes.

And same article displays a chart showing water permability of about 100 L/cm/day/MPa for graphene in contrast to 0.5 for high-flux RO.

From phys.org:

In contrast to RO, which uses high pressure to slowly push water molecules (but not salt ions) through a porous membrane, nanoporous materials work under lower pressures and provide well-defined channels that can filter salt water at a faster rate than RO membranes.
However, this is the first time that scientists have explored the potential role of nanoporous graphene as a filter for water desalination. Single-layer graphene, which is just one carbon atom thick, is the ultimate thin membrane, making it advantageous for water desalination since water flux across a membrane scales inversely with the membrane’s thickness.
[...]
The scientists explain that there are two main challenges facing the use of nanoporous graphene for desalination purposes. One is achieving a narrow pore size distribution, although rapid experimental progress in synthesizing highly ordered porous graphene suggests that this may soon be feasible. The other challenge is mechanical stability under applied pressure, which could be achieved using a thin-film support layer such as that used in RO materials.

The TFA is just a BS article that says nothing.
 
A better link (and is in the TFA) is Nanoporous Graphene Could Outperform Best Commercial Water Desalination Techniques
 
However that references Nanoporous graphene could outperform best commercial water desalination techniques
 
Now we finally we get to the actual link Water Desalination across Nanoporous Graphene (which unfortunately you need to have the right credentials to see - which I don't)
 
How come I can follow those links and the TFS can't?

The Russians, as well as the US, experimented with microwave technology that could beam sounds and presumably, voices into your head.

A plausible defense against such an attack? Metal headgear- a Faraday cage, as it were. If one found oneself short of a machine shop and metal working gear one may resort to using tin foil.

I wonder how effective foil would be at stopping tasers and/or microwave pain weapons? I christen the next generation: tinfoil torsos.

Life sure is funny.

"Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics and TSMC today announced they have reached agreement on the need for industry-wide collaboration to target a transition to larger, 450mm-sized wafers starting in 2012." -- 6 May 2008.

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whaddarya, some sort of web 2.0 brogrammer?!!

Get a clue jr, and drink coffee, like a real man. Black, not loaded up with sugar and whipped cream like some effete poofta hipster . And larn ya some C. Or FORTRAN at least.

"Libraries, such as for compression (zlib, libbz2, ppmd) and database manipulation (sqlite3), together with a Lua (a scripting language) virtual machine. Many parts of Flame have high order logic written in Lua with effective attack subroutines and libraries compiled from C++, according to Kaspersky Lab" from http://phys.org/news/2012-05-global-flame-cyber-staggering.html Aren't at least some of these libraries licensed under open source? Does this mean that any variants or improvements must be open sourced? Just asking.

While I applaud the notion, this all overlooks the fact that pollen from Monsanto's GM crops is wind- and insect-borne to even organic farms.

And what about scientists who say it is harmful?

Our internet is half their speed,

that's the average speed though, Netherlands is quite small and there are no mountains as far as I know, the US on the other hand is huge, you can't expect fiber optic connections in rural areas, that's also the reason why South Korea and Japan come out on top, they are very small country, of course they are also usually better than the rest of the world when it comes to technology

Our internet is half their speed, and I'm guessing that we have, proportionally, less than half the options for internet providers that they do.

Someone remind me of the specifics of when we gave telecos a bunch of taxpayer money to speed up our internet, and they, naturally, gave it to their CEOs and investors, and are now complaining they don't have the infrastructure to not throttle and cap and can't possibly afford to upgrade?

The dutch probably didn't do that. Just a wild guess.

Has Skype found a way to deal with issues like this yet?

http://phys.org/news/2011-05-encrypted-voip.html

Just put them in a dome.

Or give them a backpack: http://phys.org/news135003243.html

I'm all for helping other nations but I think we should help ourselves first. It's only when we set a successful example will other countries want to follow that example.

So we want to show the world to be selfish. Exactly how is the whole world working to further their own self interest going to advance any form of collective or civilized goals?

It's called tit for tat as the solution to the prisoner's dilemma, but in the end, most world issues more closely mirror the snowdrift. When we work for our own selfish goals we achieve them. But when we work together, we accomplish so much more than just the sum of our efforts. This for example is why assembly lines work.

From the link http://phys.org/news/2012-04-scanning-brain-impending-error.html

"Cirett found that the students performed at comparable levels on the math problems,
but the English learners stumbled a bit. "It was the language barrier.""

Reading between the lines I figure this would detect confusion over the meaning of word problems.
Also explaining the twenty seconds alert, as this confusion would occur before working on the problem.

It was a real-world problem for Toyota in 2010:
http://phys.org/news186942408.html

Or, do you have a link to something that would read their black box data?

Having just finished reading this reminder gives me an even worse feeling that science will die to profit seekers. Especially with the ad potential.

In other recent news:Cassini successfully flies over Enceladus Scroll to 3rd picture