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http://www.universetoday.com/7...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

http://www.popsci.com/technolo...

You cannot "freeze dry" alcohol because alcohol is a pure liquid at room temperature and to make it solid you would need a temperature of -78C which is a little on the cold side for anyone not Canadian. Powdered alcohol is actually alcohol absorbed by something else as desribed here and if you want to make it yourself the instructions are here... just don't do this if you happen to live somewhere where you are now not allowed to do it anymore!

I also read that on average, the planet has been getting greener...

http://www.popsci.com/new-stud...

If you find the topic interesting, there was a very thorough and interesting feature in Popular Science last year, Radio Tecnico: How the Zetas Cartel Took Over Mexico with Walkie-Talkies.

I'm usually the first to rag on those low-speed bird choppers, but his application is one where wind turbines actually make sense; A BOB, Big Old Battery, a NaS backup battery might even be appropriate.

Until someone removes the salt from the ocean it will be difficult to remote-control submarine drones. Training dolphins or creating a new breed of soldiers that can breath, eat and drink underwater is probably less ambitious.

You think so? We're already seeing ocean-going robots now . It's not going to be too long before these things are both cheap and impressively capable. Both our military and others will, I'm sure, find lots of interesting uses for this technology.

Water-breathing humans will be a bit longer off, I'd predict.

Until someone removes the salt from the ocean it will be difficult to remote-control submarine drones. Training dolphins or creating a new breed of soldiers that can breath, eat and drink underwater is probably less ambitious.

You think so? We're already seeing ocean-going robots now . It's not going to be too long before these things are both cheap and impressively capable. Both our military and others will, I'm sure, find lots of interesting uses for this technology.

Water-breathing humans will be a bit longer off, I'd predict.

Wristband Sensors Can Detect, and Possibly Predict, Life ...
http://www.popsci.com/science/...

Best Fitness Trackers for 2015 | PCMag.com:
pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404445,00.asp

It's a current area of research, but electronics can be hardened to an astonishing degree.

http://www.popsci.com/technolo...

http://www.navsea.navy.mil/nsw... (warning, BIG PDF).

I raise you another link: http://www.popsci.com/science/... ;-)

The point being, we don't know what's out there. There universe is literally infinite. If crystalline life is possible... and it certainly looks like it is... then it has to be out there somewhere. The question is how common is it?

This is a very old news item. I remember reading about this several years ago. There are even how-to instructions published in 2012.

As soon as an electric car drives a 1000 miles in a day, you'll move the bar to a 1005.

Besides, your 1000 miles has already repeatedly broken,

http://www.popsci.com/cars/art...
http://gas2.org/2012/06/14/ren...

And don't forget the crow NY-Times had to eat in an apology to R. Goddard after claiming rockets wouldn't work in the vacuum of space.

http://www.popsci.com/military...

Exactly what I was thinking, especially since a story about Cassini is on the front page as well. Could Cassini ascertain that life exists on Earth from its orbit around Saturn? I would think the answer is surely no.

Using the lower bar set by the parent post, I did find a experiment was run by Galileo during its Earth flyby:

The cosmologist Carl Sagan, pondering the question of whether life on Earth could be easily detected from space, devised a set of experiments in the late 1980s using Galileo' s remote sensing instruments during the mission's first Earth flyby in December 1990. After data acquisition and processing, Sagan et al. published a paper in Nature in 1993 detailing the results of the experiment. Galileo had indeed found what are now referred to as the "Sagan criteria for life". These included strong absorption of light at the red end of the visible spectrum (especially over continents) which was caused by absorption by chlorophyll in photosynthesizing plants, absorption bands of molecular oxygen which is also a result of plant activity, infrared absorption bands caused by the ~1 micromole per mole (mol/mol) of methane in Earth's atmosphere (a gas which must be replenished by either volcanic or biological activity), and modulated narrowband radio wave transmissions uncharacteristic of any known natural source. Galileo' s experiments were thus the first ever controls in the newborn science of astrobiological remote sensing.

Also relevant:
http://www.popsci.com/science/...

Check it out.

So, plenty of the water in our solar system could be younger than the sun precisely because it was made by the sun.

Ill just leave this here. Feel free to ignore it if it doesn't match your version of reality.
NASA can't hire enough engineers. Why?
NASA faces looming engineer shortage.
The ones they have are leaving. Why?
The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA
Bureaucracy is great when they are getting the job done. Not so much when they slow and often halt progress. They are inefficient with the current management style they use. Bureaucracy run amok is my take on it. Poor decision making and bureaucratic overhead preventing things from being done cheaper. Wasteful money pits where they pour cash and get nothing in return.
NASA Has Spent $20 Billion On Canceled Projects

Are you sure?

Can I just say,

From the mouths of ANYONE who isn't an American.
STOP FUCKING GEO-REDIRECTING LINKS FOR FOREIGNERS YOU ASSHOLES.

Jesus christ fuck me gently it's the worst god damned thing to do on any web page, I think it might actually be worse than "this content is not available in your region" - because at least it takes us (mostly) to what we wanted.

http://www.popsci.com/article/...
takes me to
http://www.popsci.com.au/?src=...

Thanks dipshits.

The link above works fine for me. It links to a PopSci article. Here is the url I get to.

A little internet research proves you are in error viperiodaenz. I had read about it in SF novels (means nothing, but sometimes the ideas are partially true). I also had read about it in scientific research, as rocket travel is expensive, dangerous and non-reusable. Same tech for 50 years. Cannot change chemical reactions. So I found a couple of links that may help. The first explores the real possibility of a electromagnetic railgun shooting small loads several times a day. If the loads were of a standard size, it would greatly speed up space exploration. One could even build a more modern space station. Here is that link: http://physics.stackexchange.c.... The other is about NASA engineers combining a railgun with a scramjet to make it sazfe for human flight. Completely re-usable. Here that link: http://www.popsci.com/technolo.... So, my idea is not as far-fetched as you thought. As to whether the load can be radioactive waste, those hazards would have to be calculated.

If you completely turned off the sun, http://www.popsci.com/node/117... says it'd take a week for the temperature to hit 0 F, a temperature at which Canadians survive.

"I expect to drive myself around for the next 30 years or more; I doubt self-driving cars in the price range that I can justify paying will come out any time soon."

- you might and i think you propably will drive your car, but

1) point to point easy things are already done. http://www.popsci.com/technolo... (first relevant thing shown up on search)
2) give it some more time and maybe through postal and amazon services coverage will take on. there is just some advantage on having car drive itself for almost 24/7.
3) if/when things can be transported why not people. if selfdriving taxi is half the price of manually driven would you really need or want that driver?
4)? do you really need your own car?

30 years - you will drive your car - and long after that. i just don't see any point in owning a car that can 'on itself' pay it's own price by transporting goods or personnel while i'm not using it. Why buy a robot and only use it 2 hrs. a day when it can do it almost 24/7?

You are barking up the wrong tree.

Of course there is no conspiracy and I very much appreciate that Jeff Bezos invests into General Fusion.

What I find problematic is that ITER crowds out other fusion research due to its cost overuns. For instance there are now only 1 1 1/2 positions allocated to the Shiva star device (a machine GF could put to good use for plasma compression experiments). This is just enough money to prevent a mothballing of the machine, but not enough to actually get some research done.

This is not conspiracy but just how the world works. As ITER absorbs more money the overall public budget doesn't grow, and government is too inflexible to allow for private partnership (especially with, god forbid, a Canadian company).

I notice that only gas is listed as adding new emissions. But hydro has methane emissions from the vegetation that's flooded when the dam is constructed. Not to mention the concrete that makes the dam. Solar, wind, and nuclear also have some building emissions costs, unless you replace all construction vehicles with electric and find a way to make concrete and steel without carbon emissions. (Wood might be an alternative for certain parts of wind turbines and maybe even solar frameworks.) Gas should probably have much higher emissions too, as the whole infrastructure from the well to the power station leaks methane. (How much is debated, but it's not zero.)

I don't understand how this is news, or the darkest material.
Ex. http://www.popsci.com/technolo...

They have one that absorbs 99.970% of light (ie. allows 0.030% to pass), and it was created in 2007 (7 years ago). NASA was also working on one at that time using the same VACNT (vertically aligned carbon nano tubes) process, though NASA only reached 99.5% absorption.

There's been others before this as well. I recall my physics teacher back in '94 talking about some really expensive jars of really black stuff, though I can't recall the name of it. It has similar properties as far as the human eye is concerned (it just looked like nothing).

Here's some more examples:
http://news.nationalgeographic...

IE:
2003 guiness world record holder is a nickel-phosphorus alloy (reflects 0.35% of visible light).
2008, Rice University + Polytechnic Institute folks made a VACNT that reflected only 0.045% of light.

We should be pursuing the legacy of Robert Brusard https://www.youtube.com/watch?... like these folks http://www.talk-polywell.org/b.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... It works, 15 year old students have made it work in a lab http://www.popsci.com/diy/arti... and $100m would build a proof of concept energy positive plant. I have no idea why we have not done this other than we may have already under the NAVY but they aren't talking. NASA should build one for interplanetary ion engines.

optical mice

Get a good laser mouse. Any flat surface will do (even glass).

Please provide a single scientific proof of anything Al Gore ever accomplished?

OTOH:

Blood And Gore: Making A Killing On Anti-Carbon Investment Hype

Al Gore invests millions to make billions in cap-and-trade software

Al Gore Invests $6M To Make BILLIONS In Cap And Trade

Gore lies to Congress about personal finances

Gore’s Dual Role: Advocate and Investor

The Money and Connections Behind Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade

Al Gore pushes Global Warming for personal profit

Cyber-Thieves Make Millions from Emissions Cap-and-Trade Scam

Obama's draft budget projects cap-and-trade revenue

Cap-and-trade: The biggest scam of all

Experts: Carbon Tax needed and NOT Cap-and-Trade Emission Trading Scheme (ETS)

Leading Global Warming Crusader: Cap and Trade May INCREASE CO2 Emissions

Cap-and-Trade's Unlikely Critics: Its Creators

Fraud in Europe's Cap and Trade System a 'Red Flag,' Critics Say

Spending Cap and Trade Auction Revenues Will Undermine California’s Climate Goals

Yet LFTR get's pooh poohed because it's experimental. Amazing.

I admire Elon Musk. But he's dead wrong. Neil Degrasse Tyson is right.

I admire Neil Degrasse Tyson, but he's basically shilling for NASA. (I like NASA, more on their limits below.) And he is over simplifying what people's motivations where.

As others have pointed out, taking your company public means surrendering a significant amount of control over the long term. Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.

Good thing Elon Musk has stated over and over that he won't take SpaceX public until all the long term development is done, specifically for those reasons.

NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.

You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.

Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.

NASA lives and dies by congressional funding and congressional funding is fickle. NASA has done great things, but those days are over and where basically a fluke. President's come in, they say they want to return to the Moon or go to Mars but they don't push congress to fund a coherent plan. Next president comes in, new plan, still not funded. When congress does fund something, the funding is based on getting jobs in their own districts not on what actually makes sense from an engineering standpoint. Look into the history of the "Space Launch System" (that's the rocket congress wants NASA to build that would be used to send people to Mars.) It's mandated that it must use components from Space Shuttle technology. In the space industry, the Space Launch System is known as "the rocket to nowhere." NASA's history is littered with cancelled projects due to the fickleness of Presidents and Congress.

At this point in history, the US Congress is incapable of funding an expensive and on going coherent space program. I don't see that changing in the next twenty years. NASA may land a man on Mars in the 2030s, but I doubt it. But even if NASA does land a human on Mars in the 2030s, they are not working on the technologies, infrastructure and transportation systems to put a colony there. If NASA puts humans on Mars, it will be just like when we landed on the Moon. Plant a flag, shout "we're #1", and then go home.

Elon is overreaching with this.

No, he's reaching. Something I wish more people would do even though they may fail.

Long live the oligarchy (and how sad is it that is our best hope?)

It is tragic what happened to your sister-in-law and our hearts go out to all of you. There road ahead may be long and difficult, but there is hope for improving the situation. Brain-machine interfaces have been successfully used to help paralyzed people communicate and interact with the outside world. http://www.popsci.com/technolo... The technology has not been perfected. But there are solutions that work even today and steady progress is being made.

The trouble with drones is that most of them don't have enough sensing to avoid other aircraft. Most don't have aviation transponders. Yet some of them are big enough that they're a hazard to other aircraft. Many of them can get 500 feet above ground level (AGL). (Aircraft other than helicopters are supposed to stay 500' AGL, 1000' AGL in congested areas. Around airports, airspace is controlled all the way to the ground.) This puts them in conflict with other aircraft. Here's a small Parrot drone at 1553 feet in the UK. It's little, but if it was sucked into a jet engine, the engine would definitely be damaged and might fail. In 2013, someone was flying a drone near JFK in New York and the drone had a near miss with a jetliner.

The Academy of Model Aeronautics used to have a 450' AGL rule, and the FAA has a clear rule about doing anything off the ground within 5 miles of an airport without coordination with the tower. That's enough to keep the little guys from interfering with aircraft.

The other side of this is that aircraft regulated by the FAA are considered not to be violating the property rights of the property overflown. Being overflown at 100' by an HDTV camera isn't a hazard to aviation, but property owners may object.

Oh yes, railguns will use guided rounds.

That's ten-year-old news!, reporting is going a bit slow today.
The railgun's projectile is to have an energy of 64 Megajoules. The DD(X) frigate (or destroyer, I don't know the difference much) was originally a candidate for getting a railgun ; that was canned at some point I think.

Here's a video with some testing and stuff done in October 2006
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I had not watched it back then, I remember the high res, short one that simply showed the bangs and shot, I don't remember in which year. Sadly the PDF I remember from 2004 with schematic line drawings is offline ( http://www.battelle.org/navy/r... )
Here's one railgun news article from 2004. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/...

P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.

Carbon capture plants will require 25–40% more coal to produce the same amount of electricity compared to blithely-dump-CO2-into-the-air plants.That would tighten up the competition with wind and solar, but not make it "too expensive to use". CO2 leaking from storage remains a legitimate concern.

As for growing forests, I like the idea of turning them into buildings.

The 90's ???? This concept was proposed in the back in August 1970 in Popular Science. article "Super Flywheel to power Zero Emission Car".

I also remember a same concept article talking about buses (mass transit) when I went to school (don't remember the magazine though).

The 90's ???? This concept was proposed in the back in August 1970 in Popular Science. article "Super Flywheel to power Zero Emission Car".

I also remember a same concept article talking about buses (mass transit) when I went to school (don't remember the magazine though).

This air-hybrid system uses nitrogen, hydraulic fluid, a hydraulic motor, and a couple of high-pressure tanks. I imagine it shouldn't cost much more than this flywheel, and it should store energy much longer.

Guessing you've moved on, but the link above is location-specific. You could try this one: http://www.popsci.com/blog-net...

Sorry for the second reply, but I just came across a very interesting and relevant article about Watson being used to create recipes. http://www.popsci.com/article/...

BOB cost $25M, and stores 4MW for 8 hrs, so my back of napkin est is $782K/MWhr, pretty pricey for the capacity.

Oops, I forgot to say that part. :) They don't want some civilian, or worse a foreign intelligence agency, getting a hold of one.

Ditching in the desert, or ditching in the ocean, as long as it's a hard impact, would scatter pieces. In the ocean, it's much harder to find them and try to figure out how they went together. It's also harder to collect the pieces so others won't find them.

On land, depending on where it hit and who was there, parts or all of it could be retrieved before gov't folks arrived. It would be worse, if it crashed somewhere populated (like downtown San Diego), or somewhere it wouldn't easily returned (like Mexico). The later risks an international incident.

I suspect they opted for water instead of land because of the 2008 F/A-18 crash in San Diego, and others. People get all upset when an airplane crashes in their city.

I'm surprised they don't have pyrotechnics on-board to remove any sensitive equipment. Looking at this report on another crash, they had to go to the crash site to collect the good bits. This one, regarding the same type aircraft says they don't have self-destruct mechanisms, but can wipe their storage if instructed to.

I would have thought a way to make the aircraft a pile of worthless scrap before it hits the ground would have been one of the first things they put on when they decided these would be in a recon/combat role.

But did Wyden actually know about PRISM?

http://www.popsci.com/technolo...

Don't be so sure about that.

One thing missed in all of this is that we are close (relatively speaking)[1][2][3] to being able to grow a number of organs. It's entirely likely that this entire debate will a be a footnote in a future wikipedia article.

By the time infrastructure to support organ sales, the associated legislation, and oversight could be put in place, we would probably be well on the way to therapeutic use of many these advances. In the meantime, it could detract from funding and research efforts if there were an inexpensive (in a strictly financial sense) alternative to synthetic organs, which will likely be expensive initially.

1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/04/198110553/scientists-grow-simple-human-liver-in-a-petri-dish
2. http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060403/full/news060403-3.html
3. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/scientists-engineer-lab-grown-heart-tissue-beats-its-own

Don't forget the allegedly smuggled "Moon Museum" etching on Apollo 12. Andy Warhol penis sketch FTW.

This somewhat bizarre story stems from research conducted by Colombia University historian Gwen Wright, whose PBS show History Detectives unearthed evidence that a tiny, penny-sized ceramic chip etched with six sketches – one each from Warhol, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain and Forrest "Frosty" Myers – landed on the moon with the Apollo 12 mission and is still there today.

I'm not impressed with Triple DES, nor the "security" allegedly provided by having the PIN decryption at the point of sale boxes. But you can always just go for brute force decryption.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-09/infographic-day-fastest-way-crack-4-digit-pin-number

Given tens of millions of credit cards, you're bound to slide right into enough of them to make the crack worth while.

I don't think anyone ever expected that something akin to actual deflector shields for use on earth might be practical anytime soon, that they would always be the stuff of science fiction. At least this offers the possibility of actually making something like them with matter and not a theoretical energy shield requiring massive nuclear reactors.

Very interesting stuff - Metamaterials

Before science gets hot and bothered about the loss of data scientists need to do something about the quality of the data they produce to begin with. Frankly given the complete lack of quality controls that a lot of scientists use the loss of their data is probably for the best. Depending on the field as much as 60% of all scientific research cannot even be reproduced. Work that cannot be reproduced by another team is far from isolated to one field either:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/half-cancer-scientists-have-been-unable-reproduce-studies-survey-finds
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/reproducing_scientific_studies_a_good_housekeeping_seal_of_approval_.html
https://www.xsede.org/gateways-for-open-science
http://www.eusci.org.uk/articles/data-doesnt-lie-scientists-do

Depending on the study that means that either the data has been fabricated by unethical scientists, or the data has been misrepresnted for political purposes. Studies are often improperly interpreted by failing to take into account sound statistical modeling and noise is reported as science. In some fields politics have effectively taken over (e.g. social sciences) and standards are used that would never be tolerated in other scientific fields.

The very culture of science that demands quantity over quality needs to change as the rat race that inspires junk science to begin with. I can't think of any other field where those kinds of failure rates about the reproducibility of your work would do anything other than get you fired for fraud and destroy your career. I like science, I have since I was a young child, but the junk were getting labeled as science doesn't deserve the label.

Panspermia is the concept of taking one in a trillion odds of a shot hitting the target and firing that shot a trillion times. I'm not particularly advocating for it, but it has at least some basis in plausibility.

We know that rocks from others planets can and do get shot out by meteor impacts on a routine basis as some have landed on Earth. We know that these impacts shoot out large quantities of rocks at a time into space at random directions. We also know that gravitational currents can help objects naturally move between planets.

We also know that bacteria can survive being left in outer space for years at a time. We know that the interior of a meteorite does not particularly heat up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. We know that bacteria are found inside of rocks inside the Earth when we look for them.

Now I'm not going to get into life (bacteria etc) evolving and everything that goes with it. I'm certainly not saying that Panspermia has any evidence of having ever occurred. I'm simply saying that the idea of Panspermia has at least some plausibility as a delivery mechanism for bacteria like life that had already evolved on it's own.

Or, put it in a Faraday pouch

You get the same CARRIER LOST effect, without putting another handful of blood minerals into a landfill.