Slashdot Mirror

Remember that even 1 T is already a ridiculously high unit of magnetic flux density... In order to achieve the claimed effects you'd still need a pretty strong magnetic field, probably at about 100 T,

Not sure. You can wave a bit steel around near a 15T magnet (not at full field, with the metal about 1m away) and feel it. Not sure if the effect of a rotating hard drive would be enough to degauss it in that field though.

still not small potatoes (given that the world record for a continuous magnetic field is only 45 T, and a non-destructive pulsed magnetic field is 91 T),

Non destructive to what? They've reached 97.5T for a magnet which survives the pulse http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-los-alamos-world-record-pulsed-magnetic.html and the single turn has reached 240T http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/usershub/training/summerschool/documents/Monday/0840%20Boebinger%20Betts%20Intro%20to%20Pulsed%20Magnets%20rev.pdf. The single turn does destroy the coil each time, but since the Lorentz forces cause it to fly outwards, the sample survives.

Well, most of the time. Sometimes it goes spectacularly wrong but that just adds to the fun :)

Same info from a less laughable, one-sided source:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-co2-atmosphere.html

My fundamental assumption is that wind and similar variable supply alternatives should be decisively over-provisioned (e.g. it should have to operate at about 20% of maximum capacity in order to supply it's average expected load), and that that, combined with things like geothermal and tidal should provide the base fundamentals of the grid; effectively the base load. The studies (by a "trusted 3rd party", Stanford) linked from Wikipedia say that you can use 33% of average capacity as baseload as long as you link together ten or more wind farms. At the point where this is done you don't need the large base load power plants of the past just fill in for peaks and/or rare periods where large amounts of your wind and solar falls at the same time and you don't have enough hydro to make up for it.

I'd also add another thing that I believe is important, and is definitely coming. Chemical storage of energy. There are various processes for converting electricity into methane. This is a much better process than conversion into hydrogen for a number of reasons.

• Methane can be transported in the same pipes as Natural gas.
• Excess Methane can safely and easily be used to fuel vehicles
• Methane is much easier to store than hydrogen; it doesn't leak away
• Methane is more stable and safer than hydrogen
• Methane can be used to make polyethene etc..

Now think about a methane generating plant close to a Wind farm and a gas turbine power plant. The conversion plant is able to get really cheap energy from the wind farm when the wind is high (transmission capacity doesn't have to be built for all of the wind power available) and should be running most of the time with the exception of special times of low wind or moderate wind and high demand. If the wind speed collapses, then there's transmission capacity which makes the gas plant cheap to run. Excess energy can be converted into sellable fuel. By having a simple pipeline you can get fuel away when there's an excess and guarantee the gas plant can run when you have a non windy period or a moderately windy period and high demand from elsewhere.

In other words, you have a combined power strategy which is (locally) carbon negative and which will provide proper base load power. Now imagine a Germany which has invested in this big time. Like 80% of their power needs. Suddenly they have gone from being an net energy importer to being an exporter of both electricity and natural gas.

Does this rely on new / risky / difficult technology? I guess a there's a small risk with the methane generation (though hydrogen could be substituted without to many of the arguments changing). I think, though that it's mostly just an engineering and money question. The Germans are probably the right ones to pull it off though they'll probably have to get involved in some more windy/sunny countries to do so, and if they do it will be the French buying energy from them and not the other way.

Next add the fact that there are a bunch of new ideas for energy storge (underwater high pressure air! / underground pump storage) and generation (advanced wave technologies; concentrated solar into molten salt) really starting to appear and we have a situation which should be exciting Slashdotters and making them ask "how would I work around that" and "what could I do to make that better". Instead we end up with a big pile of what is frankly whining about how the world doesn't understand how they understand Nuclear (and I'm not including your excellent post about base load there; knowing the problem is the first stage of working out how to fix it). What could you guys do to make consumers not mind a smart grid which reduced their electricity supply occasionally?

Look to the future guys and gals.. There's going to be lots of jobs in Germany working this all out.

Albert Einstein and a colleague of his were grief-stricken when they heard about an entire family that was killed when the Ammonia gas leaked out of their refrigerator.

Refrigerant fluid needs to be pumped, so there is a seal around the shaft from the electric motor to the pump mechanism. Seals blow all the time - if your car leaks oil, the chances are pretty good it's a leaky seal. A blown seal on a car will drip oil, maybe ruin your engine, but if you blow the seal that's holding in a bunch of compressed Ammonia gas and you can't get outside to fresh air quickly enough, you'll die horribly. I imagine it was just like being in a World War I gas attack.

At the time Freon had not yet been developed, so the only effective refrigerator coolant available was Ammonia, NH3. The Ammonium Hydroxide floor cleaner is NH3Oh, basically Ammonia gas dissolved in water, and smells pungently of the Ammonia gas evaporating from the solution, but not so much as to be toxic.

Einstein and his colleague decided to use the basic laws of thermodynamics to design a refrigerator that would have no moving parts at all. Thus it could be a sealed system, most likely out of copper or brass pipes soldered together. There would be some chance of leaking through the solder joints, but they can be adequately pressure-tested during manufacture, and are not so likely to wear out as mechanical seals.

I've seen it on The Series of Tubes before, let me find you a link... Einstein's green refrigerator making a comeback. Besides Ammonia it also uses Butane and Water. You apply heat to one part of the assembly, and another part gets cold. The article points out that the heat source could be the Sun; a cylindrical or parabolic mirror on the roof of your house could supply the heat, so it would use no electricity at all!

Einstein's collaborator was his former student Leo Szilard. Szilard also invented the fission bomb. Einstein is widely credited with writing the letter to President Roosevelt that convinced the President to initiate the Manhattan Project, but that letter was actually written by Szilard. Szilard just asked Einstein to sign it because Szilard, at the time, was young and largely unknown, while Einstein was one of the most famous people on the planet. Presidents know to open that kind of junk mail!

Did you know that Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do?
Do you know why? Because they had a working memory!

"Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to push 3-D printing technology even further. Their goals: create whole working machines and perhaps even buildings. Thus far, 3D printing has been used to make shapes of plastic or metal that can be assembled later. "

Right. How about this:
  http://www.physorg.com/news190873132.html -- printing structures on the moon.
  http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/the-worlds-first-printed-building/
  http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/16/173210/Printing-a-Building?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)

Functional Machines:
  http://www.psfk.com/2011/03/3d-printing-a-lightweight-super-strong-bicycle.html
  http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=01e_1310566165

The list goes on...

(And -- RIght-on Nimbius!)
 

For example worker bees can't reproduce

They can and do. Bees are less specialised than ants and termites. Sorry for interrupting, please continue with your home-spun folksy gut-feeling science-talk.

You mean this?

Thanks for the link and other suggestion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Shark_Hunt

I knew Carter was a farmer and a bit of a nuclear engineer, but I did not know he was a Bob Dylan fan. :-) Although it is an interesting song Carter mentions, a protest song about protest songs, or maybe something more? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie's_Farm

That is a great video on Carter. He really was, morally, the best we could have hoped for as a president. If Carter had gotten four more years, I wonder what our world would be like, as he made mistakes, but might have learned from them?

Don't know if this is true?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory

But in any case, it is sad that such a morel person, Jimmy Carter, lost his bid for re-election in part for blowback for immoral things done by earlier administrations (the original destruction of a democratic government in Iran).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

I had renewable energy newspapers from around 1980-1984 and you could see the change from optimism to despair as Reagan came in and made changes. Otherwise, we might have had this sort of 24 hours a day solar-thermal power plant twenty years ago in the USA:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gemasolar-solar-thermal-power-hours.html

I fear you may be right about gridlock etc., but I can hope you will be wrong. Maybe we will at least see action at a local level?
http://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Power-Localism-David-Morris/dp/0807008753

See, for optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

In any case, we will see solutions in other countries (including China which is led by a lot of engineers).
http://www.economist.com/node/13496638
"The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking. An engineerâ(TM)s job, at least in theory, is to ensure things work, that the bridge stays up or the dam holds. The process by which projects get built is usually secondary. That also seems true of Chinese politics, in which government often rides roughshod over critics. Engineers are supposed to focus on the long term; buildings have no merit if they will col

Ignoring how there are lots of energy storage solutions that are improving from batteries to hydrogen stored in metal hydrides, what about simple thermal storage in molten salt?
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gemasolar-solar-thermal-power-hours.html
"The Gemasolar 19.9-MW Concentrated Solar Power system is a âoepower towerâ plant, consisting of an array of 2,650 heliostats (mirrors) that aim solar radiation at the top of a 140-m (450-ft) central tower. The radiation heats molten salts that circulate inside the tower to temperatures of more than 500 ÂC (932 ÂF). The hot molten salts are then stored in tanks that are specially designed to maintain the high temperatures. This cutting-edge heat storage system enables the power plant to run steam turbines and generate electricity for up to 15 hours without any incoming solar radiation."

Why not just have solar PV heat molten salt, too? So, there are solutions.

Thorium power would be cool, true. But we'll probably have hot or cold fusion soon enough, rendering it obsolete.

But I thought sending or receiving a SMS message was more expensive per MB than getting data from the Hubble Space Telescope. I suppose it is a workable solution if you really need data access but can't get it otherwise but I wonder about this since I also see stories about how excessive SMS messages going out over the control channels could overwhelm the cell network.

He was wrong on the details and displays terrible ability to use google to find the right article, but he was right that the 1.3B judgment was struck down. To my knowledge a new amount has not been settled on. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-billion-award-tossed-sap-oracle.html

Mr. Rucker (har) may also want to read the actual paper in Nature. You'll need to view it through a library that has a subscription, though. The citation is:

Kirby, J. et al. 2011. Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation, Nature 476, 429–433 (25 August 2011)

It is strange that the "climate-change/global-warming religion" didn't prevent its publication. I also don't see much evidence that "CERN is not offering much press on this", given that the paper is in Nature, a rather well-known scientific journal, and CERN itself has a press release about it, where this statement is made:

"The CLOUD results show that a few kilometres up in the atmosphere sulphuric acid and water vapour can rapidly form clusters, and that cosmic rays enhance the formation rate by up to ten-fold or more. However, in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, within about a kilometre of Earth's surface, the CLOUD results show that additional vapours such as ammonia are required. Crucially, however, the CLOUD results show that sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays - are not sufficient to explain atmospheric observations of aerosol formation. Additional vapours must therefore be involved, and finding out their identity will be the next step for CLOUD."

There are more details on that page, such as this PDF, which states:

"This result leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could also influence climate. However, it is premature to conclude that cosmic rays have a significant influence on climate until the additional nucleating vapours have been identified, their ion enhancement measured, and the ultimate effects on clouds have been confirmed."

Emphasis added.

If he doesn't like the account from Discover Magazine/Phil Plait, there's also this one from PhysOrg.com. Maybe with these sources he can manage to find one that isn't as liberally biased as he seems to think most of reality is.

The first non-bird species of reptile? I've heard that it is also the first non-mammal species of reptile to have its genome sequenced. Seriously though, the Slashdot summary may sound stupid (shocking, I know) but the story is actually quite interesting. Of course this is not something to read about in the International Business Times! There is a much better article in Scientific American: Lizard Genome Unveiled: First non-avian reptile sequence helps explain vertebrate evolution by Lee Sweetlove. Highly recommended reading. I also recommend this article on PhysOrg: First lizard genome sequenced by Haley Bridger. Ths story is particularly remarkable that when we have successfully sequenced the genomes of the entire line of the fish - reptile - bird - mammal evolution then we will finally be able to prove the theory even beyond any reasonable doubt of intelligent designers. Hopefully this breakthrough will start an interesting discussion in the world of science about the exact details of the natural selection in general and the speciation in particular.

If this "breakthrough" only just now made quantum computers practical, then how are quantum computers already commercially available?

There's oil on Titan - more oil than Earth. There may even be a subterranean ocean of it.

TFA notes that this work was done by Martin Brasier's team and that Brasier has generally been a strong critic of a lot of the claims about early fossilized life. That may be strong evidence that this claim should be taken seriously. However, there have been times before where scientists have criticized claims coming from other groups even as they've made nearly identical claims. It looks like Brasier et al. have done much more careful chemical work than some of the other early life claims which makes this look promising but this probably won't be completely clear until a bit more work by other groups is done. It is also important to note that it is extremely unlikely that we are finding the very first life. Most likely, life had to be pretty common already in order for it to have a decent chance to leave fossils. This means that one can tentatively guess that life arose at least a few million years before when these fossils were formed.

We keep pushing farther and farther back in time when life arose on Earth. This is important since it helps us figure out just how likely life is to arise in general. The argument goes that if life is easy to start then we should expect to see life arise soon after heavy bombardment of Earth begins. And that's what we do seem to be seeing. This suggests that life may be plentiful. There's a substantial very recent argument against this line of reasoning by David Spiegel and Edwin Turner http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-astrophysicists-logic-downplay-probability-extraterrestrial.html. Spiegel and Turner argued that if it generally takes a lot of time to get intelligent life to develop then intelligent life will have an observer bias since it will only arise on the planets where life started very early. This means that seeing life early on in our history might be something which we should expect even if life arises really rarely.

Here's something for this observation too - http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-global-snowstorms-scientists.html

As a counterpoint for anecdotal evidence, you may want to read the news stories about record heatwaves through the US over the past month...

Yeah this is nice. If the weather is warmer, it's because of global warming. If it gets colder it's also global warming. You guys are hilarious. Any kind of evidence, either warmer or cooler somehow manages to support your hypothesis. You can't really expect me to take you seriously if this is your line of argument.

No actually that is all you have. There's plenty of historical evidence to indicate that temperature rise leads the atmospheric CO2 increase. The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven. Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models.

I see these statements all the time - unfortunatley they have become urban legend rather than having a basis in fact. Here's some reading:
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m5
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m18

Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.

Here's something for this observation too - http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-global-snowstorms-scientists.html

As a counterpoint for anecdotal evidence, you may want to read the news stories about record heatwaves through the US over the past month...

If matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, then it would mean that the virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that exist for a limited time in the quantum vacuum are “gravitational dipoles.” That is, each pair forms a system in which the virtual particle has a positive gravitational charge, while the virtual antiparticle has a negative gravitational charge. In this scenario, the quantum vacuum contains many virtual gravitational dipoles, taking the form of a dipolar fluid.

“We can consider our universe as a union of two mutually interacting entities,” Hajdukovic said. “The first entity is our ‘normal’ matter (hence we do not assume the existence of dark matter and dark energy), immersed in the second entity, the quantum vacuum, considered as a sea of different kinds of virtual dipoles, including gravitational dipoles.”

He goes on to explain that the virtual gravitational dipoles in the quantum vacuum can be gravitationally polarized by the baryonic matter in nearby massive stars and galaxies. When the virtual dipoles align, they produce an additional gravitational field that can combine with the gravitational field produced by stars and galaxies. As such, the gravitationally polarized quantum vacuum could produce the same “speeding up” effect on the rotational curves of galaxies as either hypothetical dark matter or a modified law of gravity.

Basically what this means to me, is that the effect is on a super-massive scale and not easily manipulated by us without the technology to literally change things on super-massive scale.

"Dr. Lixia Yang (above) and her co-author, Ralf Krampe of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, found that seniors were able to retain 50 per cent of concepts they learned almost a year before."

C'mon, has everyone forgotten about Spider Goats? The progress has appeared slow (those articles are a decade apart), but that's possibly due to the more-military-than-civilian applications thus far.

You don't need spiders, you just need goats...

http://www.physorg.com/news194539934.html

Interestingly there is at least one company building one-off houses using a 3D printing-style device --- out of concrete:

http://www.physorg.com/news139161727.html

William

One of my main sources is the RSS feed and website of PhysOrg. http://www.physorg.com/

Great breadth and depth across science and medicine. Very quick in getting stories out on new developments. And most of their articles provide links to the original research paper or news release.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

I've thrown all the feeds from each of these sites into Google Reader. In no particular order:

wired.com
slashdot.org
spectrum.ieee.org
scientistscanvas.com
arxiv.org
techcrunch.com
techdirt.com
news.discovery.com
physicsworld.com
newscientist.com
physorg.com
nationalgeographic.com
scienceblog.com

I have plenty more. Any RSS feeder app works. You get some repeats but there's a constant stream of science news.

http://www.physorg.com/latest-news/

Science news delivered periodically to your inbox. Some of them are customizable, so you can receive updates only on topics of interest to you.

Highly recommended:
American Scientist
Physorg

Also interesting:
Spaceweather
Nasa Science News
Nasa Earth Observatory
Discover Magazine

I imagine there are RSS feeds for most of these as well if you prefer that format.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
http://www.physorg.com/physics-news/
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/

Startswithabang especially goes into some very nice details about astrophysics topics and has some smart people commenting.

Batteries don't exactly behave like a bomb on impact. It could even be painted with an energy-creating material. Since there's no shade at 30,000' it should do well.

Chernobyl - also begins a discussion of "Xenon Poisoning'

  You may find this article interesting.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

Holy supporting research Batman! http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-solar-panels-cool.html

You are now aware that not one but two 'inventors' submitted patent applications within hours of each-other to patent the 'invention' of a telephone. One requirement of patentability is that the 'invention' is not obvious other individuals skilled in the art of whatever field the 'inventor' is working in.

Clearly, the mere fact that we already had electrical lines for the purpose of communication (telegraph), and that we new how to recreate sounds by reproducing their vibrations, and that we use sound via our voices to communicate, and the fact that in was obvious to many that electricity could be used to transmit sounds, and the fact that TWO craftsmen created essentially the same technology separately is enough to prove that the invention of a telephone was an iterative and obvious creation -- something not unique in the mind of a single individual.

What grand new concept has the 'inventor' mentioned in the TFA invented? Do not flying drones already exist? I'm sorry, but duct-taping a knife to a fork handle does not an invention make. You are so very much like the uncreative person that thinks, "I wouldn't have thought of that, so no one could have thought of that -- Grant this Genius a patent!", while all the skilled individuals shake their heads and weep over the broken patent system.

I put it to you that necessity is the mother of invention, and given that there are many minds who may take up the task to meet a necessary goal using technology, that none are truly unique enough to warrant the granting of an exclusive monopoly over an idea solely because they met the need first. We harm not only 2nd place, but also all other creators who have spent money on R&D but have not yet completed their project. The net loss is inexcusable.

The fashion industry has no patents or copyrights... How will they ever create a new clothing line without such incentives?! Hint: They will meet the market demand for new products by creating new products, and competitors will compete in terms of nouveau, quality and price giving customers a wide selection. Simply because idea monopolies are extinguished does not mean the markets for new tech will vanish.

R&D will then be money well spent because you will be sure you can at-least produce a device instead of gambling on whether someone else who created something similar first (within the past 20 years) will be able to prevent you from selling the product of your hard work. How is it that you advocate having only one implementation of a solution as a product instead of many? Licensing? AFTER spending your own money to produce a product you pay MORE to be able to use & sell it? For those concerned with secret knowledge being kept, I'm afraid you underestimate the capabilities of the reverse engineers.

The patent system has never worked as intended, the very concept is flawed; Its a burden born by our culture, the weight of which is beginning to exceeding our desire to bear it.

Patents are an expensive and stifling mental restriction system. ESPECIALLY when patents are grated for merely assembling a device that is similar in function to another device. (although the form is different -- I'm sure I can find devices with similar form, yet lacking a few features -- ::sigh:: El Camino patents.)

What great innovation does this newly patented device bring? What important problem is TFA's alleged 'invention' a solution to that none have been capable of achieving for so long, or that no one else could have invented? Did the 'inventor' not say he simply assembled it from readily available components? Would not anyone who wanted a to create a similar device be capable of doing so easily? (before the patent monopoly was granted...)

Do you not see the invalidity of the patent grant due to our patent system's lack of testing for obviousness?

Furthermore, when a truly important enough problem is solved would it not benefit society as a whole more to have free access to use the idea?

What NASA really needs to do is put time, money and man power on this type of a spacecraft.

A reusable, multi-mission space craft that is basically a space station that goes from one gravity well to another. It should have life support, exercise facilities and plenty of space for people to live in for up to a year or more. You want to go to mars? send up a lander and ascent vehicle on small launchers, attach to the Nautilus. Then send up astronauts on another small vehicle. Go to mars, do your mission, come back to LEO and leave it parked up there for another mission.

If you can carve up construction of the Nautilus into pieces small enough to be launched by existing launchers, you can take all the budget you would have used developing an 130MT launcher and throw it into building something like the Nautilus.

The political application in the modern era may be relatively new

True, and that's when it became a problem for the rest of us.

The post that started this discussion claimed it was creationism that is holding back technology advancements and that is just not true.

I'd like to agree with you but I have deeper misgivings. Science isn't a collection of knowledge and facts, it's a process for acquiring and understanding them -- the only one that works. Those who would bring religion into science classrooms can have only one goal -- to teach kids that reality isn't all that interesting and important, and that objective truth plays second fiddle to spirituality.

And it's working. It's 2011, and 59% of U.S. physicians believe in an afterlife (or at least they did in 2005 when the survey was conducted). A similar percentage favor 'intelligent design' over Darwinian models of evolution.

Are those figures in line with what you'd have guessed? You may disagree but IMHO those surveys are a big deal, even though they involve medical doctors rather than technologists and engineers. They tell me that respect for science as the only valid process for learning about our Universe, our world, and our bodies is in decline. There's no way you would have gotten results like these in the Sputnik era, or even in the 1930s.

The more science does for people -- and the less religion does for them -- the more they seem to cling to the latter. That's not entirely the fault of public education but it damned sure should be a big concern for it.

The article fails to explain what's new here, a major failing since most every slashdotter will have heard of circuit repair pens. These guys apparently used silver nano-particles and hydroxyethyl cellulose to create a flexible conductor, presumably much more so than the circuit repair pens that have been around forever. I must admit I've never tried using a repair pen on something flexible, but I'm guessing it dries pretty rigid.

I think you are right as it stands now there is no practical method for storing sufficient energy for off peak hours.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-cheap-abundant-cathode-material-hydrogen.html
http://esciencenews.com/sources/physorg/2011/03/22/research.team.develops.lightweight.portable.power.using.hydrogen.fuel.pellets

Though this problem maybe insurmountable. (Human nature.)
http://www.raptureforums.com/forum/breaking-news-world-events/50312-rhetoric-about-environmental-controls-killing-jobs-getting-louder-louder.html

15 TW with nuclear only, The world would need about 15,000 nuclear reactors. Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement. it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission.
  To date, there have been 11 nuclear accidents at the level of a full or partial core-melt. these 11 accidents occurred during a cumulated total of 14,000 reactor-years.

Scaling up to 15,000 reactors would mean we would have a major accident somewhere in the world every month.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

Apparently the Firefox team is working on this right now.

I'd disagree, It seems there's a steady stream of articles in IEEE or other magazines about cool research that IBM is doing (e.g. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-ibm-graphene-based-circuit.html). I think the issue is that the current problems driving innovation in companies as big as IBM are much more technical and thus more difficult to explain to a general audience, except as "20% faster" or other forgettable phrases. I suspect there's a lot of cool stuff going on.

You're correct, at present we've only managed to find quasi-monopoles.
Large-scale cousin of elusive 'magnetic monopoles' found

I'm eager to see if the MoEDAL Experiment manages to pull of a find of true magnetic monopoles, though.

You're correct, at present we've only managed to find quasi-monopoles.
Large-scale cousin of elusive 'magnetic monopoles' found

I'm eager to see if the MoEDAL Experiment manages to pull of a find of true magnetic monopoles, though.

The best videos, processed and raw, are available in javascript, flash, and mpg from the lockheedmartin/solarsoft group that handles SDO AIA: http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/ssw/ssw_client/data/ssw_service_110606_235609_98013/www/

If you look at the proton monitors in L1 http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/SIS_24h.html and earth geosynchronous http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/Proton.gif orbit there is a very suggestive correlation between this flare and a flux of high energy protons! The timing is about right and the flare itself is positioned such that the parker spiral http://spaceweather.uma.es/solarstorms_files/figura1bc.JPG of the interplanetary magnetic field http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2434rAbImf0 would put earth in sun spot 1226's path http://i.imgur.com/ZIffl.gif. This tight coupling of timing between the flare time (~06:30:00) and proton arrival (07:00:00) suggests not a coronal mass ejection (that takes days) but instead of weakly relativistic particle beam traveling down the magnetic field lines to earth in only tens of minutes. This interpetation is confirmed by the UMA automatic solar energetic particle forcaster http://spaceweather.uma.es/forecastpanel.htm and later in the day mentioned by a press release http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-unusual-solar-storm-disrupt-earth.html.

see: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-samsung-mass-30nm-class-gigabyte-memory.html

Samsung has had 32GB/40nm sticks out for over a year, 16GB out for 2 years, now they are about to ship the 30nm 16/32GB modules with lower power consumption. Price per GB is bad.
Memory4less has:
Samsung 16GB PC3-8500 DDR3-1066MHz ECC Registered CL7 240-Pin DIMM
~$950, other speeds for more $
32GB sticks run ~$2,150 and up
= about 6 to 7 times the cost/GB of vanilla 4GB sticks on newegg, or about 3 to 4 times the cost/GB of 8GB ECC sticks.

link 1

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Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs May 11, 2011 by Lisa Zyga http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html/ As Abbott notes in his study, global power consumption today is about 15 terawatts (TW). Currently, the global nuclear power supply capacity is only 375 gigawatts (GW). In order to examine the large-scale limits of nuclear power, Abbott estimates that to supply 15 TW with nuclear only, we would need about 15,000 nuclear reactors. In his analysis, Abbott explores the consequences of building, operating, and decommissioning 15,000 reactors on the Earth, looking at factors such as the amount of land required, radioactive waste, accident rate, risk of proliferation into weapons, uranium abundance and extraction, and the exotic metals used to build the reactors themselves. âoeA nuclear power station is resource-hungry and, apart from the fuel, uses many rare metals in its construction,â Abbott told PhysOrg.com. âoeThe dream of a utopia where the world is powered off fission or fusion reactors is simply unattainable. Even a supply of as little as 1 TW stretches resources considerably.â His findings, some of which are based on the results of previous studies, are summarized below. Land and location: One nuclear reactor plant requires about 20.5 km2 (7.9 mi2) of land to accommodate the nuclear power station itself, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing, and supporting infrastructure. Secondly, nuclear reactors need to be located near a massive body of coolant water, but away from dense population zones and natural disaster zones. Simply finding 15,000 locations on Earth that fulfill these requirements is extremely challenging. Lifetime: Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after 40-60 years of operation due to neutron embrittlement - cracks that develop on the metal surfaces due to radiation. If nuclear stations need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then with 15,000 nuclear power stations, one station would need to be built and another decommissioned somewhere in the world every day. Currently, it takes 6-12 years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic. Nuclear waste: Although nuclear technology has been around for 60 years, there is still no universally agreed mode of disposal. Itâ(TM)s uncertain whether burying the spent fuel and the spent reactor vessels (which are also highly radioactive) may cause radioactive leakage into groundwater or the environment via geological movement. Accident rate: To date, there have been 11 nuclear accidents at the level of a full or partial core-melt. These accidents are not the minor accidents that can be avoided with improved safety technology; they are rare events that are not even possible to model in a system as complex as a nuclear station, and arise from unforeseen pathways and unpredictable circumstances (such as the Fukushima accident). Considering that these 11 accidents occurred during a cumulated total of 14,000 reactor-years of nuclear operations, scaling up to 15,000 reactors would mean we would have a major accident somewhere in the world every month. Proliferation: The more nuclear power stations, the greater the likelihood that materials and expertise for making nuclear weapons may proliferate. Although reactors have proliferation resistance measures, maintaining accountability for 15,000 reactor sites worldwide would be nearly impossible. Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.) Uranium extraction from seawater: Uranium is mos

Not to throw cold water on the joke too much but in fact Samsung phones have the same issue.

Since the new slashdot look is now broken and doesn't let me accurately preview comments (cuts off the top half of the text, making snippets unreadable), I'm just going to comment without knowing if anyone else addressed this.

Ignoring the question of whether nuclear is safer than wind, nuclear isn't sufficiently scalable. Period. Future advancements MIGHT change this, but even the best modern designs won't allow the world to replace all the world's coal plans, let alone create 15TW+ of nuclear.

Here's the question I have : given that the given arguments against nuclear power are bogus. The dangers of nuclear power, when evaluated as sum(chance_of_occurence * cost_of_occurence) for all occurances, is MUCH less than solar, and the positive payoff (ie. energy for billions of people) of nuclear power is much greater than solar or wind ... why the hell would anyone oppose nuclear power ? I mean I realize pretty faces on the idiot tube are saying this, but have you ever thought about this for yourself ?

I don't oppose nuclear power, I think it's a tremendous advancement. I just don't think it is an economic, practical, or even theoretically viable alternative to a huge portion of our current power generation. In terms of large-scale policy decisions, the highest and fastest returns come from conservation efforts--we have a lot of low-hanging fruit there (insulation, mileage, etc.). Beyond that, wind is the only economically viable, scalable alternative energy... we've dammed most dammable rivers, geothermal uses a ton of water, solar is still expensive, etc.

At least for the US, wind is the smart and immediate option. Solar, particularly solar thermal, are still making rapid improvements... and I expect them to be able to provide great returns in the future.

It is because nuclear power does fail on many many levels: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

I just read this article on China Daily this morning about the mad rush for iPad 2s' today, saw a clip of this story on CCTV News half an hour ago, then come to read Slashdot only to find out that this story is the top of the front page. I've been reading Slashdot since 1997, and I'm used to stories being submitted days, weeks, months, and sometimes years after the fact. Apple fans going crazy for new products is too trite for news nowadays, but Slashdot being current is a rather creepy occurrence... I'm not sure whether to be pleased or to expect Duke Nukem Forever to be released next...

A more interesting article from the site is the wearable cat ears that move to your expressions. How long before all of the Cosplay girls start adopting these?