Slashdot Mirror

What some people refer to as "simplest grammar" is probably isolating morphology. This is more common in creoles (languages recently formed out of a pidgin) than elsewhere. English itself is a product of partial creolization, namely with Norman French after the invasion of 1066, which is part of why it's less inflected than its close cousin German. Using simple or not-so-simple morphology shows whether or not the language is widely learned by second-language learners.

But isolating morphology is also common in languages that have eroded words' initial and final consonants so far that they have cheshirized into tones, and tones are more common in humid climates.

Apparently, you are unaware that solar energy can be stored, whether we look at photovoltaic being stored in batteries or solar thermal being stored in thermal reservoirs.

It's a new world, friend.

Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we've been able to determine not only what it's made out of, but how long it's been since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years.

Umm, not so much.

Might want to check out other theories like ones that incorporate quantum theories.

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-b...

"(Phys.org) - The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a "Big Bang" did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately afterâ"not at or beforeâ"the singularity.

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org."

Strat

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-w...
http://seclists.org/cert/2012/...
http://secunia.com/advisories/...
http://secunia.com/advisories/...
http://secunia.com/advisories/...
http://securityevaluators.com/...
http://securityevaluators.com/...
http://slashdot.org/submission...
http://soylentnews.org/article...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

http://phys.org/news/2015-10-m...

Still factually challenged as always.

BTW do you need me to go into the effect of volcanic activity in the region to further demolish your point or will you keep screaming "sea ice" ?

It probably only makes up about a tenth of the mass locally in the disk of the Milky Way: http://m.phys.org/news/2012-06...

And for a triple score you can continue on in your religious belief

http://phys.org/news/2015-10-m...

Thank you for playing.

It's a known quantity.

Right. . . It is not like there are tons of new discoveries every day , right? Sorry, but your assertion is absurd. Knowing how CRISPR, itself, works in no way reduces the risk when we use it on all the stuff (you know, life on planet Earth) we barely understand.

How about we perform an experiment. . .you and I both get into fully automated cars. I allow you to randomly change binary bits of my car's programming (much like natural mutation). You allow me to randomly change source code functions, configuration values, etc. . . of your car (much like the genetic script kiddie activities you are asserting are complete harmless). Let's see who lives longest. . . : )

Sorry, try this: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-n...

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-n... 404 error, page cannot be found.

Re: "becoming" mainstream, don't think it's there yet: I think something over 50% of practicing physicists accept it as of a few years ago, which is a change from even a decade ago. As for other interpretations, experiments like this one are making the CI much harder to swallow - instantaneous collapse? Really? FTL signaling?

Besides, Copenhagen is just a worse explanatory framework. If we're going to make any progress on quantum computation, thinking about what's _really_ going on rather than about mysterious shadows and collapse keeps things simple, local, and deterministic (in the multiversal sense of course) But you're right that something like Cramer's Transactional Interpretation could be the cause rather than multiple worlds. I just find it hard to stomach the idea of "backward causation".

And as for droughts - they are increasing as a direct result of climate change: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-h...

Let's look at the actual paper and the actual claim:

Results are given in section 3, where we present evidence that a change in the regionâ(TM)s climate has been detected and that it is unlikely that the observed Novemberâ"April Mediterranean drying since 1902 occurred due to internal variability alone. Diagnosis of the CMIP3 coupled models reveals that this detected change toward drier conditions is attributable, in part, to the Mediterranean regionâ(TM)s sensitivity to time-evolving external radiative forcing. The amplitude of the externally forced, area-averaged drying signal is roughly one-half the magnitude of the observed drying during 1902â"2010, indicating that other processes likely also contributed.

They are speaking of really poor correlation here. There are other man-made effects that need to be considered, like water table depletion, vegetation removal, and agricultural practices.

ORLY? http://www.scientificamerican....

"Climate" is used several times, but aside from empty assertions that climate affects or impacts the potential range of a disease, no connection has been claimed between the incident of tropic diseases in the US and climate change. The actual connection is travel with people bringing back diseases from the tropics.

Oh, prices are low right now. Just wait until a significant part of farmland becomes desert or salt marsh.

No, they aren't. And the primary reason why farmland would become desert or salt marsh is mismanagement both of the land and water resources. This is quite relevant because climate change might negatively impact the productivity of farmland (or it might not), but poor land and water management will negatively impact the productivity of farmland frequently to the point of the land no longer being viable farmland.

My view is that management is far more important than climate when it comes to agriculture and growing the food we need to the point that it doesn't really matter what the climate does.

Droughts are natural and they havent been increasing in frequency or intensity, unless you can otherwise prove it.

EVERYTHING is natural, up to and including asteroids slamming into planets. And as for droughts - they are increasing as a direct result of climate change: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-h...

Tropical disease spreading has not been linked to an increase of 0.8c, that would be rediculous.

ORLY? http://www.scientificamerican....

Food prices have skyrocketed because of so called GREEN initiatives like wasting maze/corn for fuel production.

Oh, prices are low right now. Just wait until a significant part of farmland becomes desert or salt marsh.

More like "hydrocarbons and organic compounds are fairly common in the universe".

You can't make up a 288 billion mile alcohol cloud and not have people laugh at you. Find it for real, and everyone stands around going "wow, really?".

The universe has all sorts of wacky stuff in it. This probably isn't even much of a stretch.

  There are other "air" batteries ( or anodes, to be precise) that are close to or even surpassing fossil fuel density although they mostly need higher temps and are still in early development

http://phys.org/news/2013-09-m...

Gasoline is still anywhere from 2x - 12x as energy dense as these molten-air batteries per kg but has a lower capacity per liter by 1.1x - 3x so your battery pack will still be much heavier than a gas tank but will occupy significantly less space than presently available EV battery packs.

If a lightening bolt strikes an ethernet connected device in the trees, the ethernet cable just melts/burns away.

Or maybe it becomes a conductive plasma. OK, I'm at least half joking. But we are talking about lightning, here. Also, how much current do you really need to fry your delicate electronic equipment? ISTR being told that a couple volts over spec will fry things. With the push for low voltage, the spec is pretty narrow.

Great discussion. I don't want to over-complicate, but we would be remiss if we didn't bring up the fact that some "junk" DNA is not junk at all, even if it is "non-coding" (does not encode for a protein product). The original concept of genes is that they have "exons" and "introns", where the exons code for parts of a protein product, and the introns get snipped out during the process of generating RNA from DNA. But some of the so-called junk DNA generates different kinds of RNA rather than standard "messenger RNA" or mRNA. For example they have found what are called microRNAs, small nucleolar RNAs and others. These tend to modify how other RNAs function (messenger RNAs and transfer RNAs which link base pairs to amino acids in ribosomes) etc. So there are many levels of complexity and mutations can happen in any of these different DNA regions thus affecting not just protein structure (when an exon is mutated) but also how gene regulation occurs (e.g., when microRNA regions are mutated). It will be interesting to see in the future if more "junk" DNA turns out to be doing something unique.

http://phys.org/news/2010-10-j...

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2...

It just confirmed what has been obvious for decades. Part of the long chain of fuckups at Fukushima was having stuff "temporarily" on-site that should have had something better than the ridiculous adhoc storage that was used implemented a couple of decades ago.

Precisely. I'm not against the idea of developing nuclear power but any rational person looking at the facts will uncover that it has a lot of problems that need to be fixed. It has the potential to solve problems, if it is done right however all to often we see a fixation on reactor technology instead of looking at the entire industry as a whole and the challenges it poses.

Geologically sound containment facilities should be one of those 'no-brainer' issues solved decades ago.

Also reprocessing is a method to avoid a shortage of fuel, it's not a waste management solution - in fact it results in an increase in low level waste. An illustration of that is that France, the only nation to do extensive reprocessing, this month shipped a few tons of radioactive waste to Australia.

I missed that one, thank you.

It is waste that is much easier to deal with and store than spent fuel rods but it still needs attention. Reprocessing is not a case of waving a magic wand and making the waste go away, it has an entirely different purpose which is very useful but not the same thing as waste management.

The Nuclear industry is in a mess and it is in the commercial interests of the oil and coal industry to stifle any evolution of that would allow it to compete in the energy market. I think that they are very happy with the current state of affairs. Storing spent fuel rods in a proper containment facility would mean that the industry would reduce the impact of any potential accidents and create a threat to coal's electricity business.

I think a more modern reactor design / more research seem more useful and a better approach
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-n...
http://www.triplepundit.com/sp...
https://www.eskimo.com/~nanook... ..

Just get going :)

Of course Swedish parliament sadly has treated the environmentalist anti-nationalist well-fare party as some sort of center-party everyone can agree to rule with even though they are the most extreme ones after the communists. So as such we have shitty hippie stuff such as wind-power, rotten grass, rotten sea-.. uhm.. tubeanimals, energy from trees and other stupid things which won't be able to compete and won't be as efficient as say solar-power anyway so why bother?

The animals supposedly brought up phosphor and nitrogen from the sea and as such could be used as a fertilizer, that's OK I guess but I'd prefer they used plants rather than animals if they are brought up just to rot them and make energy out of them. These animals supposedly undevelop/destroy part of their "brain" once they have fixed themselves somewhere but still.

I hate these anti-progress idiots ("economical growth is bad - it ruins the environment!", Sweden have some other complete utter ridiculous leftard idiots, "who cares that mass-immigration cost money? It's irrelevant, one just need to raise taxes!", yeah, because money come from nowhere and the government / all states are just stupid who don't increase taxes. In the end it would be nice if these idiots understood that you can only share what you've produced and if the immigrants suck at producing something of value then you'd have less worth to share.)

Also white-genocide and so on. 1 800 migrants / day, 10 000+ / week, this for a country with less than 10 million people and about 8 million Swedish born and well, I don't know how many Swedes, 6 million?

I think a more modern reactor design / more research seem more useful and a better approach
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-n...
http://www.triplepundit.com/sp...
https://www.eskimo.com/~nanook... ..

Just get going :)

Or you need a display being able to replicate the whole of a light field, like an hologram.
(I'm talking about *real* holograms here, not fictional Star Wars volumetric display "holograms")

Significant progress has been done in recent years in creating actual holographic displays on which the image can be changed :
(as compared to non-changing holographic "prints" like this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-f...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-h...
(though you'd need a mighty good graphic card to push 45 billion pixels per second?)

Or you need a display being able to replicate the whole of a light field, like an hologram.
(I'm talking about *real* holograms here, not fictional Star Wars volumetric display "holograms")

Significant progress has been done in recent years in creating actual holographic displays on which the image can be changed :
(as compared to non-changing holographic "prints" like this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-f...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-h...
(though you'd need a mighty good graphic card to push 45 billion pixels per second?)

Or you need a display being able to replicate the whole of a light field, like an hologram.
(I'm talking about *real* holograms here, not fictional Star Wars volumetric display "holograms")

Significant progress has been done in recent years in creating actual holographic displays on which the image can be changed :
(as compared to non-changing holographic "prints" like this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-f...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-h...
(though you'd need a mighty good graphic card to push 45 billion pixels per second?)

Paint it orange and give it a little LED headlight for rescue. I'd be happy to see a robot roach if I were buried.

I assume you mean this

They have shown that the exact same room-temperature nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiment used to factor 143 can actually factor an entire class of numbers, although this was not known until now. Because this computation, which is based on a minimization algorithm involving 4 qubits, does not require prior knowledge of the answer, it outperforms all implementations of Shor's algorithm to date, which do require prior knowledge of the answer. Expanding on this method, the researchers also theoretically show how the same minimization algorithm can be used to factor even larger numbers, such as 291,311, with only 6 qubits.

On top of this, in the same paper the researchers demonstrated the first quantum factorization of a "triprime," which is the product of three prime numbers. Here, the researchers used a 3-qubit factorization method to factor the triprime 175, which has the factors 5, 5, and 7.

The previous record was 143, and they did 56,153. And it works on *classes* of numbers, and moves into interesting new triprime territory.

That leads me to believe your comment is dildos. This technique vastly improves on previous methods, and the research is ongoing. Quantum computing is really just beginning (okay, maybe it's 20 years old, or 50), but the progress made in 2 years is quite remarkable.

I'm currently assuming that no existing hardware will be safe in 10 years. If I'm wrong, no harm done.

http://phys.org/news/2011-06-a...

This is all very cool but I think if they can keep the thing transmitting it will be much cooler to see what it observes on the far end of the comet's orbit.
I wonder if a comet hitchhiking probe could be made to passively observe the Oort cloud and wake back up fully to report the next time its comet came back to the inner system.

67P doesn't make it all the way out to the Oort cloud, I'm afraid; it is a short-period comet. Barely gets past the orbit of Jupiter.
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...
--that's why Rosetta could rendezvous with it.

--if it did go all the way out to the Oort cloud, though, the probe wouldn't be generating any power to speak of at that distance, and hence wouldn't make any observations. Even if it did wake up next time round, all it would report was "I didn't see anything because I was turned off."

SARC: How about jail time for retweet-whores in general? (for background see this article and this original paper)

You know those folks who hear something astounding and re-tweet or re-mail or 'LIKE' or post it right away --- without taking even a MOMENT to attempt to verify or corroborate the story? A week after the Boston marathon bombing, hackers sent a bogus tweet from the official Twitter handle of the Associated Press. It read: "*Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured*." Before the AP and White House could correct the record, the stock market responded, dropping more than 140 points in a matter of minutes (almost completely recovered after).

Apr 23, 2013 1:07 pm - AP Twitter account hacked, Bogus Tweet appears.
Apr 23, 2013 1:08 pm - DOW stock average drops 150 points
Apr 23, 2013 1:10 pm - AP employee tweets, ignore message, we've been hacked
Apr 23, 2013 1:13 pm - AP tweets retraction message, suspends account

Here's how it looked ONE MINUTE LATER. Red dots are folks just sending it along. Blue are those inquiring back to the source about its veracity, and yellow are those directly expressing doubt.

THREE MINUTES AFTER it looked like this. The clumpy red crescent in the image below represents the first wave re-tweeters portrayed above, with a continually branching network of successive waves.

Note the successive chains of red dots and whole regions without blue or yellow. This is a map of just Twitter. For hours copies of the item were still expanding on all major social networks without markup or even direct questioning. Who are these people?

1. Those who knew (by then) it was a hoax and were spreading it anyway (few if any). Heh heh.
2. Those who honestly thought the single message, though astounding, was properly 'sourced'.
3. Mostly, these are the people who repeatedly send you un-researched chain letter hoaxes.

Some form of digital castration may be necessary. There has been concern of late that some day there may be robots who act like people. We should also strive not to act like robots. /SARC So... what if the re-tweeters of jihad junk simply mean, "This is surprising. I am flabbergasted and twitterpated. Have a look." I've argued for a Facebook HATE button so people can call attention to things they do not like to slap a gritty edge on the touchy-feely romper room that it has become. This would be especially valuable to the FBI who would then know for absolute sure that a person is not a terrorist. Twitter should have a TWAT button... so you could TWIT a low-carb miracle diet, or TWAT Hitler's Final Solution.

SARC: How about jail time for retweet-whores in general? (for background see this article and this original paper)

You know those folks who hear something astounding and re-tweet or re-mail or 'LIKE' or post it right away --- without taking even a MOMENT to attempt to verify or corroborate the story? A week after the Boston marathon bombing, hackers sent a bogus tweet from the official Twitter handle of the Associated Press. It read: "*Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured*." Before the AP and White House could correct the record, the stock market responded, dropping more than 140 points in a matter of minutes (almost completely recovered after).

Apr 23, 2013 1:07 pm - AP Twitter account hacked, Bogus Tweet appears.
Apr 23, 2013 1:08 pm - DOW stock average drops 150 points
Apr 23, 2013 1:10 pm - AP employee tweets, ignore message, we've been hacked
Apr 23, 2013 1:13 pm - AP tweets retraction message, suspends account

Here's how it looked ONE MINUTE LATER. Red dots are folks just sending it along. Blue are those inquiring back to the source about its veracity, and yellow are those directly expressing doubt.

THREE MINUTES AFTER it looked like this. The clumpy red crescent in the image below represents the first wave re-tweeters portrayed above, with a continually branching network of successive waves.

Note the successive chains of red dots and whole regions without blue or yellow. This is a map of just Twitter. For hours copies of the item were still expanding on all major social networks without markup or even direct questioning. Who are these people?

1. Those who knew (by then) it was a hoax and were spreading it anyway (few if any). Heh heh.
2. Those who honestly thought the single message, though astounding, was properly 'sourced'.
3. Mostly, these are the people who repeatedly send you un-researched chain letter hoaxes.

Some form of digital castration may be necessary. There has been concern of late that some day there may be robots who act like people. We should also strive not to act like robots. /SARC So... what if the re-tweeters of jihad junk simply mean, "This is surprising. I am flabbergasted and twitterpated. Have a look." I've argued for a Facebook HATE button so people can call attention to things they do not like to slap a gritty edge on the touchy-feely romper room that it has become. This would be especially valuable to the FBI who would then know for absolute sure that a person is not a terrorist. Twitter should have a TWAT button... so you could TWIT a low-carb miracle diet, or TWAT Hitler's Final Solution.

SARC: How about jail time for retweet-whores in general? (for background see this article and this original paper)

You know those folks who hear something astounding and re-tweet or re-mail or 'LIKE' or post it right away --- without taking even a MOMENT to attempt to verify or corroborate the story? A week after the Boston marathon bombing, hackers sent a bogus tweet from the official Twitter handle of the Associated Press. It read: "*Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured*." Before the AP and White House could correct the record, the stock market responded, dropping more than 140 points in a matter of minutes (almost completely recovered after).

Apr 23, 2013 1:07 pm - AP Twitter account hacked, Bogus Tweet appears.
Apr 23, 2013 1:08 pm - DOW stock average drops 150 points
Apr 23, 2013 1:10 pm - AP employee tweets, ignore message, we've been hacked
Apr 23, 2013 1:13 pm - AP tweets retraction message, suspends account

Here's how it looked ONE MINUTE LATER. Red dots are folks just sending it along. Blue are those inquiring back to the source about its veracity, and yellow are those directly expressing doubt.

THREE MINUTES AFTER it looked like this. The clumpy red crescent in the image below represents the first wave re-tweeters portrayed above, with a continually branching network of successive waves.

Note the successive chains of red dots and whole regions without blue or yellow. This is a map of just Twitter. For hours copies of the item were still expanding on all major social networks without markup or even direct questioning. Who are these people?

1. Those who knew (by then) it was a hoax and were spreading it anyway (few if any). Heh heh.
2. Those who honestly thought the single message, though astounding, was properly 'sourced'.
3. Mostly, these are the people who repeatedly send you un-researched chain letter hoaxes.

Some form of digital castration may be necessary. There has been concern of late that some day there may be robots who act like people. We should also strive not to act like robots. /SARC So... what if the re-tweeters of jihad junk simply mean, "This is surprising. I am flabbergasted and twitterpated. Have a look." I've argued for a Facebook HATE button so people can call attention to things they do not like to slap a gritty edge on the touchy-feely romper room that it has become. This would be especially valuable to the FBI who would then know for absolute sure that a person is not a terrorist. Twitter should have a TWAT button... so you could TWIT a low-carb miracle diet, or TWAT Hitler's Final Solution.

In determining the probable cause of the accident, board members were focused on how well officials prepared for the worst. NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said Scaled Composites "put all their eggs in the basket of the pilots doing it correctly."

"My point is that a single-point human failure has to be anticipated," Sumwalt said. "The system has to be designed to compensate for the error."

Accusing the test pilot of being untrained and/or incompetent or whining about the risks of interlocks is both irrelevant and stupid. Single point operator failures should be designed out of any system that can cost a human life. That's why there are airbags, seat belts, and crumple zones in cars: because people fuck stuff up. If a new car that costs $15,000 can have these safety features then leaving equivalent features out of a spacecraft is engineering malpractice and possibly criminal negligence.

But no one will be held personally accountable. And whatever safety culture does result won't last. By the time there is a 20% staff turn over it will be completely gone. Why? Because: we're makin money here, if you don't get that then get the fuck out.

Just like in the Challenger disaster, when a technical person objects a manager will say "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." And people will die and nothing will change.

This '3D Xpoint memory' sounds very much like MRAM as described by the following article

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semic...

Last year (2014) Samsung reportedly was collaborating with 15 partners in developing similar spintronic MRAM memory technology

http://www.mram-info.com/samsu...

Hynix and Toshiba also partnered to develop their own version of MRAM

http://phys.org/news/2014-04-f...

In less than 5 years we might get to enjoy the fruits of the labor of the thousands of researchers who have been working very hard to make the spintronic dream come true, and I for one, wish to take this chance to thank them for their hard works!

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

http://quiet-environmentalist....

http://phys.org/news/2014-07-e...

We can get deeper into this if you want. I was sent a bunch of links from a german fellow in this thread that included detailed information about Polish power generation that is expanding to meet german demand.

If you want to talk about energy, then you have to look at the whole grid OR physically cut the connection at the national borders and THEN the national figures will be more reliable.

germany could just buy up all the clean power on the european grid and then call themselves clean. Never mind that the places they buy it from will more often than not fill the void with coal. Meaning whatever it says on paper, the consumption will be fueled by coal. The amount of power supplied by coal is vastly under estimated because it has become politically incorrect to source your power from coal. In the US about half our power comes from coal.

In Europe, it is likely to be higher if only because they have less nuclear power per capita and less hydro electric.

Weyl Fermions are the next 'big thing' in electronics.

"Spiral arms can hardly be formed by gravitational forces alone," Beck said. "This new IC 342 image indicates that magnetic fields also play an important role in forming spiral arms."

The new observations provided clues to another aspect of the galaxy, a bright central region that may host a black hole and also is prolifically producing new stars. To maintain the high rate of star production requires a steady inflow of gas from the galaxy's outer regions into its center.

"The magnetic field lines at the inner part of the galaxy point toward the galaxy's center, and would support an inward flow of gas," Beck said.

It seems apparent that what they're getting at is that the spiral arms are associated with electric currents which create the magnetic fields. Either way, a charge imbalance would be an easy route towards an explanation of this observation.

To date, more than 20 scientific organizations worldwide have come out against the space station and are recommending the funds be used for more important unmanned missions.

Fair is fair, Netflix et al avoid taxes through European tax havens specifically to deprive their home country of any income, so we avoid their geo restrictions.

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-n...

https://soylentnews.org/
http://phys.org/

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-p...

https://volcanocafe.wordpress....

http://www.volcanodiscovery.co...

http://www.andes.info.ec/en/et...

I agree with you on many points but I think technology has been moving in many ways to solve the problems.

On the issue of actual neurons vs ANN, I think issue 1 is probably going to be remedied by advances in memristors. The biggest issue I've seen in most ANNs has been the fact that the entire system is simulated with a single processor having to calculate every neuron, but small bunches of memristors could eventually do this for us and we'll be closer to an actual brain. See: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-b...

The issue of internal biology in neurons is a big unknown though. We know that cell biology has a big affect on cognitive ability. The real question though is how much of an affect it has on the actual processing capabilities. While many people are interested in human level intelligence, I think just being able to reach human level signal processing might bring us half way to where we need to be. In this case, the structure of the neural nets is probably more important than the careful interplay of cellular biology. Given a normal human, we can determine baselines for how different neural structures fire and then mimic those.

The population of the world is still rising, and by any estimates will keep rising until at least 10 billion inhabitants, and the limited resources we have are not growing at an equal pace, so this is still an issue.

My first thought is Malthus is into his third century of being wrong, but still people think it makes them look intelligent to wring their hands and repeat what he said.
I'll be more charitable. Population is only a problem when the expected economic value of a person becomes negative. There is absolutely nothing on the horizon that might cause that except possibly self inflicted stupidity.

If you want to look at self inflicted stupidity that could cause population to be a problem, look at California's drought. A problem created by people who stopped the projects needed to provide for increased population.

Ozone depletion is a genuine threat, and the ozone hole is one of the few examples of environmental dangers that was actually tackled by agreeing globally to ban the use of CFS andf other ozone depleting gases. If it wasn't for these actions, we'd be facing a lot more issues with regards to added UV radiation.

As someone else commented the "Ozone Hole was there before we were using CFCs" We have cut our use down to nearly nothing and it is still there.
Someone who was objective, would have to come to the conclusion that it is a natural phenomena independent of CFC use.

Unless you've found a endless source of oil,

ME ? No not at all. I am pretty good at basic chemistry but certainly not able to take that task

These people
http://phys.org/news178203219....

Well why yes.

Why does China use American computer chips in its super computers?

Citation? I Think you have your facts wrong

We're supposed to believe this will "[pass] light around the individual drops and improving visibility"?

This was mentioned a few years ago, for example: http://phys.org/news/2012-07-s...

I presume this must be the same people. But I agree, I'd rather pay $5 for a replacement headlight bulb than $5,000.

Don't give the moochers any support, they'll just spend it on alcohol-filled nebulas

Hmm, I'm pretty sure nebulas are filled with coffee, not alcohol.

Don't give the moochers any support, they'll just spend it on alcohol-filled nebulas

Net profits of $214 million on revenue of $29.33 billion. ref

Nobody is interested in generating electricity to make hydrogen because it doesn't make sense. You waste about 80% of the electricity compared to just putting it into a battery.
http://phys.org/news85074285.h...

There seems to be a cultural preference as well.

Stulp pointed to figures showing that, in the United States, shorter women and men of average height have the most reproductive success.

"There is much variation in what men and women want," he said.

"When it comes to choosing a mate, height tends to have (only) a small effect, which is not very surprising given the many other, more important, traits people value in their mate."

Not exactly ethanol, but: http://phys.org/news63346824.h...

LOL ... honestly, if you can have a cloud of alcohol in space which is 288 billion miles across ... given the sheer size of the universe, if there isn't a puddle of WD40 someplace in the universe I'll be surprised.

Billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars ... there's probably an an entire Astro Glide Nebula or something, and one made of just chocolate pudding. ;-)