Slashdot Mirror

Here's one: http://www.physorg.com/news66924222.html

There's better coverage of the story at Physorg (via Engadget).

Question: If the fuel cell contains enzymes, couldn't a 2-stage fuel cell be created that has cellulases, thus making waste switchgrass/etc. a potential direct fuel? Why would we need to even bother with cellulosic ethanol then? Or is this even possible?

I didnt know people were even listening to the former canadian defense minister. Looks like the first concrete step towards solving global warming! al gore should be happy.

Isn't this what the first mobile phones were? My grandfather used to have a big black box in his lincoln that had a phone attached to it and he'd plug into the cigarette lighter. It looked like one of these. Hard to say if he was doing a lot of global Special Focrces work though, that Lincoln never made it over 35mph.

While I understand how you might come to this conclusion, it's actually completely wrong. You demonstrate enough knowledge to intelligently question the case for space (which is relatively rare actually, but probably common here on /.), but not enough to answer it. I can't let these ideas go unchallenged because the only way new missions will be funded is if lay people continue to support them.

All of the points you made are easily refuted (see below), but the main point is that we simply must go to space to do most of the _new_ exciting science, primarily in new wavelength regimes and at high resolution.

1) "thanks to interferometry one can get the resolution (equal or better) with earth based telescopes for a fraction of the price of space-telescopes like hubble"

- ALMA is also a $1B telescope. Just because it's on the Earth doesn't make it cheap! ALMA is a good example of a great ground-based telescope, in that it can do cutting edge science more cheaply than in space. Trust me, from the NASA perspective we're very aware that you have to PROVE that your idea can't be done from the ground before you get anywhere in designing a space mission. The problem with ALMA and all interferometers is that you can only get high resolution imaging over a *tiny* area, usually just one galaxy at a time. It's great for learning about that galaxy, but useless of wide-field science like cosmic shear measurements (eg. http://www.physorg.com/news87400827.html).

2) "And thanks to adaptive optics there is hardly any atmospheric blurring which smears out the pictures anymore"

- Again, this is only true over a tiny area, typically less than 40", with a strong gradient of image correction leading to data which is very hard to work with and photometer. Useful to get the shape of 1 galaxy at a time, but that's it. And even the maximum AO correction, on axis, is inferior to what's possible from space. The sky background is also vastly lower from space, allowing us to peer much deeper into the Universe for the same exposure time. Here's some info on the limitations of AO http://www.aura-astronomy.org/nv/hst_vs_ao_2.pdf.

3) "And, since the mirrors can be bigger then those send into space, the light-gathering power is way superior for earth-based telescopes."

- Potentially true. That's why 3 groups are proposing to build a massive 30-m telescope here on Earth do adaptive optics imaging and spectroscopy. It will assume with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) the role the Keck 10-m telescopes currently play with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It will be a big light bucket allowing us to spectroscopically observe objects detected by JWST. Oh, and it will also cost $1B or more.

4) "The only advantages left are for specific wavelengths (like near-infrared), because the atmosphere absorbs most of that, but even that is more and more debatable, now that new instruments and detectors are becomming so sensitive that they can detect and use it on Earth too"

- The atmosphere actually absorbs most wavelengths, though we've been so optically-oriented for so long it might not seem like it. On the blue side, we need to go to space to study objects in gamma rays, X-rays, the far and near UV. On the red side, from about 3um to 300um we must also go to space. At longer wavelengths (eg. submm) we can work from the ground, but it's very, very hard until we get to the radio.

The atmosphere is opaque on the blue side, so no new instrumentation will not help. On the red side the are atmospheric windows we can peer through, but the issue is that everything (the telescope, the dome, the earth!) radiates thermally at precisely the wavelengths we're trying to observe. And they're thousands of times brighter, so even if we cool the IR detectors it still doesn't work very well. As an example, before the Spitze

Now we know why protecting Earth was dropped from NASA's mission statement http://www.physorg.com/news72971590.html.

It costs to much. Not too suprising considering how we're spending money like we can just print more of it. As NASA becomed the can't do agency, who will fill the void?
--
Energy delivered from space with no shipping charge: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Sure, there are plenty of environmental problems that deserve our attention. I don't think anyone disputes that part. The big questions are 1) how to deal with those problems, 2) with respect to global warming, whether the threat is real, major, and manageable enough to justify drastic action, and 3) what form (if any) that action should take.

The tendency among activists convinced that the answer to (2) is "yes" is to demand substantially increased government control over our lives, to the point of seriously proposing forced rationing via "carbon credit cards". See also here. (Friends of the Earth reacted to the proposal by saying it wasn't drastic enough.) So, part of the motivation for "arguing against global warming" (on its reality or on the need for action) is that GW is apparently being used, by some, to push a socialist agenda.

The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.

One of the most dramatic features in our global mantle shear-wave attenuation model is a very low-Q anomaly at the top of the lower mantle beneath eastern Asia. We believe that this is due to water that has been pumped into the lower mantle via the long history of the subduction of oceanic lithosphere in this region. This could result from the dehydration of hydrous phase D from cold lithosphere that has been subducted into the lower mantle. We are very interested in further pursuing the effects of water on seismic attenuation within the mantle. [Lawrence and Wysession, 2006a,b]

A release of methane hydrate?

Actually some analysts gave vista not so bright outlook. Microsoft on the other hand had expected to sell 200 million copies of Vista to consumers and businesses worldwide in its first two years. Windows XP, by comparison, sold 120 million copies in its first 24 months.

Not so much spin, as intentional clouding of the issue by MS.

Physorg.com has an article with a different slant on this company. http://www.physorg.com/news90693138.html/

Invitations to open a Gmail account are still required in North America, Asia and most parts of the South America, but Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said those restrictions will be lifted "very soon."

http://www.physorg.com/news90096289.html

Now this article was posted 18 hours ago so unless that's "very soon", invitations still seem to be required.

Let me draw a parallel: Sulfate aerosols. Twenty years ago... BAD! Spend five billion dollars on a five million dollar problem by requiring major changes to industry by amending the clean air act. Now, twenty years later, the same environmental crowd that fought against sulfates so vigorously tell us sulfate aerosols are keeping global temperatures down and should be intentionally put into the atmosphere. Keep in mind, they don't want to lift clean air act restrictions. They want to spend more money (pocket more grants) seeding it with jet airplanes, balloons and artillery cannons... I still haven't heard how this is supposed to avoid the production of acid rain, but there it is, staring you in the face. Twenty years ago, you would have told me to stuff my sulfate conspiracy theories too, I suppose.

Um, yes. Sulfate aerosols are bad. Do you dispute that? A single scientist (yes, he's a nobel laureate) is now proposing injecting them into the atmosphere. And you equate that with the "same environmental crowd" how? Are you even listening to yourself?

So you say a temperature switcheroo in a few decades is impossible?

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying - barring, of course, some obvious change such as putting a space sunshade in orbit (not that I expect that to happen).

Suppose they just throw up a two or three page "debunking" over at realclimate and continue on their merry way. Would that pass your sniff test?

No. No it would not.

As for your final comment, let me point out that you are citing the same Pat Michaels that, despite receiving large sums of money from the coal industry, has recently said:

Well, since the human warming got initiated, or began--which most people would view somewhere around the mid-1970s--the rate of global temperature rise has been remarkably constant. It's uncanny how constant it is. And it's about .17 degrees Celsius per decade, or about 1.7 degrees per century.

His "solution" of course is to just wait around for the problem to fix itself:

That number is significantly low, and it suggests to me that this becomes a self-limiting issue in the following way: 100 years from now, the technology that runs our society, and powers our society, is going to be radically different than it is today. It will almost certainly be a more efficient, maybe not even a carbon-based fuel society.

How convenient that his solution is good for the people who recently gave him so much money. Just a coincidence though, I'm sure.

As for previous IPCC predictions being alarmist, I'll send you to this link which points out that the 2001 IPCC was too conservative, if anything. (Although the temperature increases did stay within the bounds given, they were on the high end of the predictions.)

No climatologist - not Pat Michaels and not Richard Lindzen - is denying that anthropogenic global warming is happening. The only dispute is to how hot and how quickly - oh, and what to call it.

This one is a bit better, but apparently the Nature article will be released tomorrow, which I assume would have the sort of detail you're asking for.

And furthermore, now that I have read the "article", it turns out to be a freaking BLOG POST containing nine whole sentences. NINE! Sheesh. Secretsather, you deserve some serious downmods for your laziness and obvious lack of subject knowledge.

A quick news search reveals much more informative articles, which allows one to find the original journal article. Here's the abstract...

We show that the coefficients of operators in the electroweak chiral Lagrangian can be bounded if the underlying theory obeys the usual assumptions of Lorentz invariance, analyticity, unitarity, and crossing to arbitrarily short distances. Violations of these bounds can be explained by either the existence of new physics below the naive cutoff of the effective theory, or by the breakdown of one of these assumptions in the short distance theory. As a corollary, if no light resonances are found, then a measured violation of the bound would falsify generic models of string theory.

...most of which is beyond grasp of what I remember from 200-level college physics. Would a domain expert care to jump in now?

I suspect the original press release and the articles on Science Daily and PhysOrg are FUBAR. I think an article in the Washington Post is probably more accurate. Unfortunately the Phys. Rev. Letter web site doesn't seem to have the actual paper publicly available yet.

For example say I generate a one second pulse with my flashlight by pushing the switch on and then turning it off one second later. Since the distance from the filament in the flashlight bulb to the front of my flashlight is about 1cm it therefore took the light pulse from my flashlight one second to traverse the 1cm distance. That's a very slow light pulse. What a breakthrough I've made. NOT.

Of course they're a lot trickier about it with these experiments. Maybe they send the waves through substances with nonlinear transmittance characteristics or other tricks to get complicated interference patters and such, which make their pulse dectectors trip at the wrong time. What's mind boggling is that they manage to trick reputable journals into publishing this garbage.

Just yesterday I read about a funny experiment that demonstrates the absurdity of these experiments. They used similar tricks to make sound travel faster than light. Indeed they could make the sound travel at any speed they wanted. They could even make the pulse exit before it was detected entering.

http://www.physorg.com/news88249076.html

We've seen groups of things travelling at greater than the speed of light (both sound and light)....granted the individual waves do not, but the collective [word used intentionally] does. So, we just put a whole bunch of probes in some loopy PVC pipe and, "poof", we can get across the galaxy in a fraction of the time.

Layne

References:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/11/1
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Light-that-Travels- Faster-than-Light-24167.shtml
http://www.physorg.com/news88249076.html

Ah, but check this out.

They make bendy concrete!

A light echo was produced when X-ray light generated by gas falling into the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"), was reflected off gas clouds near the black hole. While the primary X-rays from the outburst would have reached Earth about 50 years ago, the reflected X-rays took a longer path and arrived in time to be recorded by Chandra.

And from the image caption ...

Clear changes in the shapes and brightness of the gas clouds are seen between the 3 different observations in 2002, 2004 and 2005. This behavior agrees with theoretical predictions for a light echo produced by Sagittarius A and helps rule out other interpretations.

You can clearly see in the images that the filaments of *plasma* have changed shape over time as you would expect plasma to do as electricity flows over it. Remember, its kinetic motions are affected by the current and the current affects its kinetic motions -- just like a plasma globe.

Where mainstream astronomers see light traveling 50 light-years and illuminating a cloud of "gas" in space, plasma cosmologist and Electric Universe Theorists see plasma doing the same stuff we've seen it do within laboratories:

From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0604 05plasmoid.htm:

The plasmoid is the "generator" that powers the intermittent ejections from a galactic core. In a galactic circuit, electrical power flows inward along the spiral arms, lighting the stars as it goes, and is concentrated and stored in the central plasmoid. When the plasmoid reaches a threshold density, it discharges, usually along the galaxy's spin axis. This process can be replicated in a laboratory with the plasma focus device.

You can see a very detailed picture of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0504 15milkyway.htm. Far from being some invisible black hole like object, we can see it and it's the same plasma torus that we can generate within laboratories.

The problem for astrophysicists today is that they need to come up with a mechanism that can explain how the gas itself is illuminating in x-rays because x-rays indicate an unusually high amount of energy is being released. And their idealized non-resistive gas laws that they use to understand how gas behaves in space do not allow for x-rays to be produced by the gas except in some very specific situations (like violent collisions). For the center of the Milky Way, the Chandra X-Ray Telescope has imaged temperatures for this gas of both 10-million degrees C and 100-million degrees C. This is anomalous to current theories. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040715 space.htm:

This result was unexpected and difficult to explain. The press release describes the problem in greater detail: "Shock waves from supernova explosions are the most likely explanation for heating the 10-million-degree gas, but how the 100-million-degree gas is heated is not known. Ordinary supernova shock waves won't work, and heating by very high-energy particles produces the wrong spectrum of X-rays. Also, the observed Galacti

That's a lot of data, but it's less than 1/10 as much data as the Large Hadron Collider will put out, and the LHC is supposed to be coming online within a year, not in six years. By the time the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes online, the LHC may have produced more data than the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will over the life of the project.

I'd be interested to know more about the data handling methods they have in place for the LHC. I don't think they'll be using Excel.

*Note the correct, non-Frudian-Slip spelling of "hadron"

45GB HD-DVd triple layer - May 2005

51GB HD-DVD Triple layer @ CES last week

Or you know you could just searched for it, I figured we'd all been accosted with so much disc format news as of late another couple links weren't really needed.
You're right that Click was released on dual layer BRD... as I said it wasn't until recently that they released them... Click was released in mid November, I'd say that constitutes "recently".

Here's an article about it.

1. The whole lake wasn't frozen; it was a patch of floating ice, called "spring ice". The wooden boat was sailing through the mostly unfrozen water.

2. See #1.

3. Maybe Peter stepped onto the edge of the ice or into the water. Or, maybe that part was made up. After all, Matthew wasn't even alive when Jesus was; all he did was compile oral stories that other people told. Oral history has a well-known way of turning actual but uninteresting events into fantastic myths.

4. There's nothing miraculous about walking on floating ice, but if observers can't see the ice and think you're walking on water, and you tell them you're walking on water, it will seem like a miracle. For comparison, look up Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. He claimed to find some gold tablets that only he could read and translate, and which were later lost. Is this true, or did he make it all up? A bunch of people in Utah believe this, but most people think it's hooey.

Be careful about PhysOrg.com: The web site carries "press releases", which are advertisements disguised as articles. (In the linked article, brand-name battery makers don't want people to buy the much less expensive but otherwise identical generic batteries, apparently. Also, battery makers want people to think it is normal to spend a lot of money on batteries.)

[sigh] The building rotates; it doesn't move. Therefore, if you know which way North is, finding the direction to Mecca is a trivial exercise. (It's slightly south of due West.) Or you could get one of these.

Agreed, of course, but there is something fishy about the article.

FRAUD??? It's true that making hydrogen is not an efficient way to store energy for use later. However, this quote is partly nonsense: "... the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare..." Water is not rare, and is could never be a problem with the production of hydrogen. I doubt that a reputable publication would print nonsense like that.

Not only is something very wrong with the article, but something is not right with the article's source, Physorg.org. Here are some Google ads at the site that seem full of fraud: "Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) -- The Next Oil Boom - See who's pumping cash by making oil for $13.21. And selling for $59. And another: Free Top Energy Profits - 5 Triple-Digit Investment Gains in Today's Alternative Energy Boom." An honest organization would never allow advertising like that, I think.

This article on the same web site seems like the beginning of fraud to me: A Printer that Delivers 1,000 Pages a Minute?. There is NO printer. There is only a poorly edited article in the online (not peer-reviewed, apparently) edition of Applied Physics Letters. The idea is called JeTrix (Jet Tricks) by the supposed developers. The idea is that a printhead that covers the whole sheet of paper can print faster than one that is small.

Recently, Slashdot has been carrying discussions of "scientific breakthroughs" that are in actuality attempts to get money from investors. The Slashdot articles are, in reality, press releases for extremely poor investment "opportunities". Is a Slashdot editor taking money to run these?

Must admit I accepted this too until the argument was put to me recently. Fact is of course that the ice is fresh water (less dense) than the sea water it floats in. Check out the links posted elsewhere to physorg about this. Archimedes principle is about the force of the ice pushing down and displacing an equal weight of sea water. But since the ice is lower density then the volume of sea water displaced is less than the volume of the fresh water in the ice ... even after melting. So when floating ice melts in sea water the sea level goes up. Check here, not just the reasoning but also the actual experiment to prove it.

You can try this yourself with a glass of water and ice cubes. Mark the water line with the ice cubes floating, then let the ice melt and notice that it hasn't moved. This is elementary school physics.

And by the time you get to college, you should have learned that the experiment does not work with saltwater.

The ice in the arctic is fresh water, the ocean it is floating in is salt.
http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html

News thats old. Stuff thats stale.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/2 0/2257252

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,117318-page,1/ar ticle.html
http://www.physorg.com/news2734.html

Thank you for your challenge, I will try to explain my view.

Biodiversity
Biofuel has the potential for becoming a huge source for energy, and therefore has the potential to become a huge source of income for farmers and energy companies. Since some species are more suited than others for biofuel production (growth rate, disease-free, water efficient, simplicity creating biomass, simplicity of extracting biofuel from biomass), these species will be preferred by biofuel producers. This means introduction of, or extending, a monoculture that is destructive for the diversity of insects, birds, plants and animals. Granted, modern agriculture is already a threat to diversity, but the introduction of biofuel production will not minimize this problem; just because everything is crap doesn't mean that it can't get any worse.

In addition, modern agriculture and biofuel production is "too effective". Decomposing trees and plants are a necessity to plants, animals and most importantly insects. Without a natural life cycle, the risk reduced biodiversity (by insect, bird and animal species going extinct) are significant.

If I may make one quote to illustrate my point, the quote comes from Simon Counsell, director of the UK-based "Rain Forest Foundation":

"The expansion of palm oil production is one of the leading causes of rain forest destruction in Southeast Asia. It is one of the most environmentally damaging commodities on the planet. Once again it appears we are trying to solve our environmental problems by dumping them in developing countries, where they have devastating effects on local people."

Invasive species
The species most suited for biofuel production are characterized by rapid growth and the ability to grow in a multitude of environments. These are also traits that characterize species prone to become invasive. Fast-growing, water-efficient plants with little or no known pests can rapidly take over entire ecosystems, replacing the natural plant life (and consequently insect, bird and animal life). Even domestic species can become invasive when the natural ecological system is destroyed.

Conclusion
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for replacing the fossil fuels of yesteryear with new energy sources, but doing so without a thought to the actual ecological cost of those energy sources is just plain stupid.

References:
http://www.ub.gu.se/sok/dissdatabas/detaljvy.xml?i d=6933

http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2005/12/bioenerg y.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673 ,1659036,00.html

Science 22 September 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5794, p. 1742. Title: Adding Biofuels to the Invasive Species Fire?

http://www.physorg.com/news78069543.html

I know that this is all really cool, but aren't Flash Memory's days numbered? I mean, ever since Samsung made their 40-nanometer chip (http://www.physorg.com/news79719955.html), I've been waiting anxiously for the Flash memory hard drive replacements. I'd give up my vortex core for a more stable and reliable storage solution, and I know many other people who would, too.

I've been reading a lot about India's growing role in the business of electronic scavenging and recycling. Seems that this Asian country with the enormous population and booming e-economy tries to find new uses from obsolete equipment. Read here: http://www.physorg.com/news67098899.html

Unlike Roland, I actually try to link to the article and not some empty blog. Roland, your technology trends suck. Link to the originating article you fool!

Physorg
Also, does Roland even have a degree in science? Because he sure doesn't ever seem to have a grasp of the important things in the articles he submits.

That's just plain wrong. They use some current, sure, but it's nowhere near "almost as much power in stand-by as when it's on". Get an ammeter and measure a few appliances yourself.

Religion is about explicitly ignoring facts and information, and believing in something that not only has no basis in reality, but is actually diametrically opposed to the facts that we DO know.

Nothing about "religion" specifically requires that it involve a belief in something diametrically opposed to the truth. If a person believes that a deity caused the Big Bang (and therefore, the subsequent evolution of the universe) to occur, that's a religious belief, but nothing about that belief contradicts the widely-accepted scientific view of what happened.

I actually think the grandparent poster has a legitimate (and perhaps important) point in ascribing a religion-like aspect to science, when it comes to the "sheeple" who accept an opinion based upon scientific research without (a) critically evaluating that research along with the research done by others that has an opposing result or (b) even bothering to understand that research beyond its political significance.

To bring us back to the topic at hand, there is research suggesting that the largest component of short-term climate change is actually due to changes in cloud formation caused by solar activity (the idea being that more sunspots, as in the mid-to-late 20th century, means fewer cosmic rays, which means less ionization in the lower atmosphere, which means fewer seeds for water droplets to form, which means fewer clouds in the lower atmosphere, which means less reflected energy, which means global warming). Research is ongoing. Rather than take an interest in important research which could change the way we think about climate change, such research is underreported by the media and underconsidered by the public because it doesn't fit with the "humans destroying their own planet" motif.

That is what the GP was talking about by comparing science with religion.

"Oh, for God's sake. It's a verifiable fact that significant amounts of Antarctic ice that have never been thawed in recorded human history are now gone. See for example this article"

Thats a small part of the Antarctic ice sheet. The East Antarctic sheet is actually growing.

"Though if you seriously think every person complaining about global warming is too stupid to know when it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, then I don't think it's worth expending much effort talking to you."

No, not every person. Most do understand the complexities of the planet's climate. However, some do not. If their first reaction to hearing about icebergs in the region was to think it must be global warming, then they probably do not understand how the seasons work.

This is my favorite. The error started from a single key-in mistake --> more than $230 million dollars in damage. How would you like to be directly responsible for one of the largest slides in the Tokyo stock exchange for 2005? http://www.physorg.com/news8901.html

Further out, maybe superconducting cables.

These are already being put to use in various areas. They are high temperature super conductors, just not room temperature super conductors. (High temperature as in above 10 kelvin). Here's an article on one instance.
http://www.physorg.com/news77909735.html

The density of saltwater is greater then the density of fresh water, so why not put a nanotech desalination membrane a few miles down in the ocean, and let the pressure differential of the salt and fresh water to push thru the membrane? No moving parts... http://www.physorg.com/news82047372.html

No. ice cores work somewhat like tree rings - with winter summer and so on, the snow deposited that form the ice change in character. This means that if you look at the ice using a magnifying glass, you will see bands and striations corresponding to seasonal cycles, with each band being one year. So, because we have ice cores with over 600 bands on them, we can see that ice in the Artic are at least 600 years old, and are not broken by a instance where, say, all of the arctic melted. (In fact http://www.physorg.com/news68305951.html implies at least 55 million years of ice history at the north pole)

In summary, it isn't the depth that gives the chronological information, but the layers. This is illustrated by:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7 f/GISP2_1855m_ice_core_layers.gif/384px-GISP2_1855 m_ice_core_layers.gif

Seriously. Every time Microsoft partners with someone it means they're doomed. Remember when Microsoft "partnered" with any of these guys?

* Netscape
* Palm
* Symantec and McAfee
* Sendo

2006 has not been a vintage year for Linux
At least 2 major dist. have had significant problems with their new releases.
Perhaps Linux should adopt the program that these guys are working on:

http://www.physorg.com/news81096007.html

"... through software that allows the computer to survive radiation-caused flaws or errors ...when you know components are going to fail, you can design the system to automatically adapt and thereby mitigate the effects of that failure."

I imagine my next comp. having 4 cores, 2 of which will be constantly running checks on the other 2, updating, replacing etc. as necessary
Heaven! ( and think how small the forums will become!)

There are other promising techniques of harvesting sunlight, to only give a small sample: this one uses buckyballs and gets 5.2% efficiency, and something sort of similar using pentacene has similar promises, and this one uses the all-famous carbon nanotubes to convert it directly into hydrogen (but for now it only works with UV-light)

If this keeps up, we'll probably have a choice from a whole range of efficiencies, and more importand $/watt.

There already are companies out there that sell solar shingles. They're not economical yet for most applications, but it's starting to come.

There are other promising techniques of harvesting sunlight, to only give a small sample: this one uses buckyballs and gets 5.2% efficiency, and something sort of similar using pentacene has similar promises, and this one uses the all-famous carbon nanotubes to convert it directly into hydrogen (but for now it only works with UV-light)

If this keeps up, we'll probably have a choice from a whole range of efficiencies, and more importand $/watt.

There already are companies out there that sell solar shingles. They're not economical yet for most applications, but it's starting to come.

There are other promising techniques of harvesting sunlight, to only give a small sample: this one uses buckyballs and gets 5.2% efficiency, and something sort of similar using pentacene has similar promises, and this one uses the all-famous carbon nanotubes to convert it directly into hydrogen (but for now it only works with UV-light)

If this keeps up, we'll probably have a choice from a whole range of efficiencies, and more importand $/watt.

There already are companies out there that sell solar shingles. They're not economical yet for most applications, but it's starting to come.

...the link goes to the "print this story" version, which prompts the user to print the story.

I was about to comment on how the advertising-is-teh-devil crowd would bitch about the number of pages the regular version spanned, but the regular version is only one page, too.

If you aren't looking to print the story... http://www.physorg.com/news79617716.html

But this just shows that there are lots of large gas giants. Maybe there's life on their moons...

If I'm not mistaken (TFA isn't very clear on this, and it's an awful website anyway), these new planets are all extremely hot Jupiters, so there won't even be life on their moons.

At least, that's what I wanted to reply. But a quick google showed that according to this, this and this, a hot Jupiter could actually mean that there are terrestrial planets in the same system.

Ofcourse that's still an untested theory. We have to actually find some terrestrial planets in such systems before we can be sure.

It's not just undocumented immigration to the U.S. that keeps population increasing. All immigration is what keeps population going up. Most studies figure Mexican immigration is only about 1/3 of total immigration to the U.S.

Now, if there was just some way to keep the Anglos from moving down to the south-west, where my family have lived, since the early 1600's...