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Actually, assuming you leave the solar panels on the ground, batteries may be a viable option:

1. Volta Volare has designed a small electric-hybrid airplane that should be able to go 200 miles on a charge. Of course, it's not an airliner, but...
2. Boeing has designed a concept airliner called the Sugar Volt (video) that can cruise on battery power alone. It could be built as early as 2035.

Very informative. I nearly forgot just how incredibly energy dense liquid fuels are.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/mobile-nuclear-reactors-could-provide-power-and-jet-fuel-military-darpa-says

Excuse me? Since when has religion had much to do with morality?

I guess you've missed a few thousand years of history?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Religion and Morality

From the beginning of Western thought, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. This is true whether we go back within Greek philosophy or within Christianity and Judaism. The present article will not try to step beyond these confines, since there are other articles on Eastern thought. The article proceeds chronologically, giving greatest length to the contemporary period. It attempts to explain the main options as they have occurred historically. The purpose of proceeding historically is to substantiate the claim that morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabulary is still deeply infused with this history. . . . More . . .

----

The belief the is not god has been around long before then belief in any god.

If we want to accept the assumptions here, I think it is much more likely there was no thought of God as opposed to thinking there was no god. Allow me to illustrate. At present, you are very unlikely to have an opinion about the subject I am going to introduce. Does it really exist or not? Is it good? Is it bad? Will I like it? Will I loath it? Why? Because you have no idea what I am talking about, there is nothing for your mind to engage on, to decide on. You have no opinion since you don't even know what I am talking about. The subject is a sort of fish dish. Well, now there is something more concrete - probably most people like some sort of fish, some don't. Now you have more to go on, the mind is working. Thoughts about fish are beginning to form. Many people who have had fish are thinking a special fish dish could be interesting, and even good. Perhaps it is a special type of tuna, yum! Ah, but this is indeed a special fish dish - a Scandinavian, really Swedish, specialty. It is herring! Oh, but this is silly, most people have heard of herring, many have tried it, so it must be good, and we know herring exists! Ah, but this is "special" herring - it is canned herring, a common thing, but with a difference. . . the cans are bulging. . . the fish is fermenting, which is a polite way of saying rotting. Ick! Nobody would eat rotting food, especially meat, especially fish! This must be a joke, there is no way that could be true, no way anyone could like it. And think of the danger of botulism. . . . So, do people eat it? true or not? First we didn't even know the subject and could make no judgments. Then we came to know more, and more, and now we need to decide, do Swedish people eat rotting herring? A little more information - when the cans are opened, it smells like a used diaper mixed with rotten egg and raw onion . So, opinions are forming and reforming, we know more and more, and now we must decide. . . do people really eat rotten fish that smells like a soiled diaper, rotten eggs, and raw onion? Or do they simply do what anyone else would do, realize their special snack which might have been a tasty treat has actually spoiled, is now contaminated with deadly toxins from the microbes, and now must be thrown away? The answer is, sane people throw it away, it is crazy to eat rotting meat. That is, unless you are Swedish, and the fish is Surströmming . In that case the can is opened outdoors, to be polite, and the fish is served on various types of flat bread with potatoes, a slice of onion or various other things, a glass of akvavit or beer, and enjoyed. (More

AFAIK, String Theorists have yet to produce even on testable hypothesis under the usual scientific standards.

There's at least one testable hypothesis. While the article barely covers the details and only intimates it in the last paragraph, the basic idea is that if you collide two particles together then it becomes possible for a graviton to "escape" into a higher dimension, thus eluding the detectors. This would demonstrate a higher dimensional universe, which is one of the tenets of M-Theory. Other scientists (e.g. Laura Mersini-Houghton, et al) in orthogonally related fields are also coming up with experiments and observations that would support M-Theory.

Russian and Korean Researchers Will Inject Mammoth DNA Into Elephant Eggs, Resurrecting 10,000-Year-Old Beast

Tell that to the hungry Velociraptor in my basement.

What about the 30,000 year old seed that sprouted? http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/russian-scientists-resurrect-pleistocene-era-plants-buried-siberian-permafrost-30000-years

Russian and Korean Researchers Will Inject Mammoth DNA Into Elephant Eggs, Resurrecting 10,000-Year-Old Beast

Dean Kamen is known for wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and workboots ever day. Same idea.

These projectiles will certainly be guided (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-08/its-experimental-rail-gun-navy-wants-gps-guided-hypersonic-projectiles) with accuracies at least as good as current ICBM systems

First, a hint about arguing on slashdot: if you want to have any credibility in a technical discussion, learn at least enough about HTML to post your citations of web pages as links. Like this: Article on PopSci web page that is written at the middle school level of reading comprehension and talks about the guidance system for rail gun ordnance that the Navy would really, really want to have (if only it could be done IRL). And that fine article also describes guided mortar rounds, which is something entirely different, not hyperkinetic at all.

The Wikipedia article cited has no relevance to the discussion.

There are plenty of ways to guide a very fast munition that do not require sticking control surfaces out in a hypersonic air stream.

In your dreams, and in USA Navy's outermost levels of disinformation, maybe.

Articles like the PopSci one do serve a useful purpose in that intelligence gatherers of foreign nations have to evaluate them, and that ties up their intellectual resources for a little bit, and sometimes might even put someone on a wild goose chase.

I read TFA, click on one of the links, and ...

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/every-six-hours-nsa-gathers-much-data-stored-entire-library-congress

Every day NSA gathers 4 times the amount of data of the entire library of congress

I do not question the availability of the disk space for all those data - after all, NSA has an unlimited budget on purchasing hard disks.

But ...

How are they going to crunch all those data?

How big the machine they have to crunch at least 40 petabytes of data every-single day?

And we are not talking about simple crunching - they need to sieve through all those data to find things that are worth to keep - and then, many of those things that are worth to keep may themselves be encrypted (terrorists ain't stupid these days) - and it takes a helluva juice to decrypt all those encrypted data.

It's truly mind boggling !!

Disclaimer: I'm no expert in spectroscopy.

Would it be possible to estimate the blood's sugar content with this kit?

It is possible non-invasively with Raman spectroscopy in the infrared:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/mit-glucose-meter-checks-blood-sugar-levels-painless-ir-light

The usual blood glucose meters have errors of up to 50% in the reading. And they still require those expensive analysis strips.
If a home blood glucose measurement would be possible with one of those kits (even if you still need to draw blood), that would rock.

Have they found an 'electrosensitive' who's prepared to go double-blind on which of a selection of ten telephones/routers is actually switched on yet?

A certain Mr Randi has a million dollars waiting for the first person to do it. Maybe he should apply for that so he can buy a new house in the woods (or even buy the neighbors house and make them go someplace else). Problem solved.

There is one guy in Sweden.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected?single-page-view=true

He does, however, live away from civilization (in the woods) and with very little electricity (because that can trigger him - doesn' tmatter the frequency).

His case though, is that it isn't just Wi-Fi. Or cellphones, it's *everything*. It's a lot more compelling than anyone who complains they got headaches after a smart meter got put in or something, especially since he moved away to the countryside and gave up modern conveniences.

You simply cannot claim to be sensitive to "WiFi" or "cellphones" or "smart meters" and live in a modern city - if you were sensitive, you'd already be off on the countryside far away from electrical infrastructure.

It's also why the "no GMO" and "organic" people are part of the problem.

GMOs often have lower yields, and organic yields are comparable to conventional -- and are more sustainable, since they're not petrochemical dependent.

I respectfully suggest you stop drinking Monsanto-brand Kool Aid and seek to become more informed about this issue.

so FUCK BP

Or, even better, give the money to Bill Andrews. With adequate funding, his company, Sierra Sciences, is 3 years away from having a small molecule telomerase activator ready for clinical trials. With all due respect to Aubrey, he has nothing in the hopper likely to produce results in our lifetimes, whereas it is entirely possible that a telomerase activator would reverse nearly all symptoms of aging.

Disclaimer: I am a Sierra Sciences employee.

Have you heard of metallic glass? That's one example of a material which is both very tough and hard. Perhaps I should have said "strong" instead of "hard" as that appears to be usually a more useful attribute. Here's some more info:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-01/new-metallic-glass-toughest-strongest-material-yet
http://www.livescience.com/10420-metallic-glass-hard-tough.html
Some choice quotes:

"Strength refers to how much force a material can take before it deforms. Toughness explains the energy required to fracture or break something; it describes an object’s ability to absorb energy. Most of the time, these qualities are mutually exclusive. “The holy grail is to get both those properties at the same time,” Ritchie said."

"The new glass has a far better combination of strength and toughness than any steel."

And they've done 91.4T in a plain coil here.

P.S. Anyone seen my car keys?

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-06/german-lab-generates-highest-magnetic-field-ever-created-lab

Using a two-layer, 440-pound copper coil the size of a water bucket, they managed to coax 91.4 teslas from their creation for just a few milliseconds, surpassing the previous record of 89 teslas.

Now I'll have to go and read the abstract...

Tim.

When Stuxnet first emerged, nearly every article touted how this was a "game changerhttp://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/stuxnet-worm-game-changer-global-cybersecurity-top-us-official-says/." Now, Kasperky so confidently says, âoeWhoever commissioned Stuxnet also commissioned Flame.â Why can't this be a copycat? Everyone predicted that copycats will emerge... and Stuxnet source code was readily available.

Engines are the classic example used for design vs. utility patents. A good example in this area is the Bruce Crower's engine, which as commented on there is sketchy to try and patent as anything other than a design patent, given how old prior art is for combining stream with engines in various ways.

Now, if you physically have one of these engines, it might be feasible to reverse engineer how it works with less resources than it takes to license the design, amortized over enough production units. The idea itself is worthless though; you need a functional prototype before you can prove this will work usefully in the real world. If I can read the summary page of a patent and duplicate the technology from that, it's really a stretch to say it's worth awarding a patent on. If it's not difficult to build a functional device (or program, to extend to software too) if we just have a brief outline of the idea, it's pretty ridiculous to claim it's an innovation big enough to patent. That's how I'd like to see the prior art claims of a patent checked. If a "person having ordinary skill in the art" can duplicate the "advance" just given the claims, not the method, that should never be a patentable advance; it's only an obvious small step forward.

Well, some of the Moto non-lapdock devices like the HD Docks allow you to use Bluetooth mice and USB keyboards, as well as HDMI out for video, so that's kind of standards-based and universal.

But don't kid yourself. No phone maker is going to willingly support interfacing with a dock from another manufacturer, even if it's just a matter of arranging connectors to only fit the layout of your own dock devices. Phone manufacturers are extremely clannish, and consider accessories a cash cow in which they want no competition. It almost took a law to make them standardize on a charger plug. I would not waste any hope on standardization of anything more complicated than +5v.

According to TFA the top layer is flexible, so for all we know these screens might be a more durable alternative in the future?

They don't mention what the flexible layer is, but that it is 200nm thick. For comparison your regular plastic wrap is 11um thick. That's over 50 times thicker than the layer they're putting on the screen. So lets assume it's something stronger than polypropylene. Aluminum would not be transparent (except in Star Trek), but thinking from a strength point of view the foil in your house is probably a little thicker than the plastic wrap, so lets go with the same 50x thicker than the film on these displays. Now imagine a little fluid filled bubble of aluminum foil 50x thinner than what we're used to, and think how long it is likely to last as a button on an electronic gadget.

The only hope I can imagine is if they're using something like this which is stronger than kevlar. But without any information on the strength of this thing I have to remain skeptical.

Now, Kennedy is also in the middle of a wildlife preserve, as is the Stennis Space Center where they do engine testing. Animals don't have the heck scared out of them at either location. Nor are their noxious chemicals spread all over.

Actually, they do spread noxious chemicals all over. Such as those caused by the shuttle. I'm not saying it is something that can't be controlled with a little regulation, and besides, Brownsville is kind of a shit hole anyways. Nevertheless, launching rockets into space DOES spew large amounts of toxic chemicals all over the place.

It's the first indicator of an invasion from Titan! Kurt Vonnegut foresaw this happening decades ago.

I think you are far too modest in your description, and you started to misspell it. They are no longer the USSR, but Russia. As the world's most heavily armed nuclear state, Russia does indeed have a history of adventurism, but it stretches back far longer than 20 years, and they specialize in this sort of activity, and know how to treat their helpers.

More like hitting a cockroach with a needle from across a football stadium, and you have millions of needles being launched at speeds well high enough to leave orbit. And then every so often you fire your needle cannon again and again.

To put this in perspective, all you have to do is look at the moon. The chances of any given spot on the moon being hit by an impact are incredibly small, so small they are astronomical. However when you look at the moon, you can see the entire thing is covered with impact craters. Your proverbial needle is being fired at your proverbial cockroach in large quantities, again and again. Sooner or later your cockroach /is/ going to get hit by a needle, a second needle and so on.

It also helps that their are what you could conceptually think of as gravity highways in space. Now you've discovered that your needles aren't just firing across the stadium randomly, but that the cannon is at least firing in their general direction.

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/scientists-map-out-gravitational-space-highways

It has turned me off Kickstarter, for sure. I'll be much more skeptical in the future and probably won't fund the more expensive ventures since I've already been dinged for $150. I hope that the publications that covered the glasses will be a little more wary when these guys show up with the next big thing.

Well here is what I see as their LAMP stack:

L: Well instead of Linux they are going to use their trusty open-source ROS for the basis of this
A: This is kind of taken care of by the next point M
M: Well they need a database with lots of functions which has previously been created: RoboEarth
P: You need a way to query this information so the people at RoboEarth have created a non-device-specific code for ROS, yey!


Now, they may want more than this, or they may also want a local database and query engine, which could be SQLite and SQL, but should probably be something more robot-specific, although if you use SQLite or something compatible, lots of people would know how to work with it out-of-the-box

As I see it, it's almost done, they just need to make RoboEarth have a large database, and get the ROS part of RoboEarth to work and they should be on their way to the Ros RoboEarth ROS Plugin? or RRR because then it could be R^3

Let's just hope there aren't any pigeon hunters nearby.

I mentioned somewhere in this thread that an old friend of mine is working on taking phage therapy mainstream in the US.

As for links, there are quite a few. Forgive me if you can't see them all, as I am at a terminal in a university right now, so lots of things are available to me for free:

http://ramsites.net/~mhickson/1934.pdf
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51637351_Bacteriophage_therapy_potential_uses_in_the_control_of_antibiotic-resistant_pathogens
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/next-phage
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jamp.2008.0701

There are many papers out there. You can google "phage therapy" and probably come up with many more.

And to answer your question, it is out of the "good idea" stage, and is now moving out of the "FDA approval" stage and into the clinic. I don't know if you can get it just yet, but if you can't, it won't be long. You just have to find some place that does it.

Pretty good analogy, aside from the fact that skinny people can generally eat more than fat people.

link

Uptime and stabilty are challenges for any large system whether it be an IBM or a Cray. What really matters is if people are able to use the system to run the programs they want to run at the scale they want to run them:

Secret Security Supercomputer Cielo, What Are You Working on Today?

Ah, so the human race has progressed materials science as far as it will go? We already know about all possible alloys, composites, and construction techniques? Science has unraveled all the mysteries of the Universe, all the way down through the quantum level? No possible advances in propulsion technology? Think again.

Materials science is the only place left to go. We saw the future, and it was unaffordable. Flying cars? Jetpacks? Supersonic airliners? All do-able. All prohibitively expensive and inefficient and unsuited for mass productions. You should read an article called The End of the Future. It sums up something I've suspected for quite some time: while we've made advances we could never dream about... computers, biotech, etc... the advances we did dream about never came, and never will (at least not in our lifetimes or those of our children or grandchildren). All those dreams of colonizing planets, traveling to other stars, floating cities, etc, ran into the hard shoals of reality, both physical and fiscal. Humanity is now actually slowing down, after a century of constantly going faster. 50 years from now, whatever Boeing is producing at it's plant will look largely like what they've been making since the 707; a fat tube with slightly swept wings and jet engines in pods underneath. It may be made of plastics and have advanced computers, but it'll carry around the same number of people and go about as fast as current airliners. The future... the one we wanted... really did die.

What are you talking about? The hackers are "possibly from abroad"! This is serious! Why would the article author use such a blatantly sensationalist subclause if it weren't serious?! Especially when the last time this was claimed turned out to be exactly what you're describing!

It's already been shown that molten metals and rocks in layers can be charged like batteries. Is it no surprise that they conduct? http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/molten-metal-batteries-could-store-extra-juice-power-grid

You can make one now if you like. There's an article here about someone working on an open source kit, but it also mentions other places that will sell you a kit to build your own.

http://www.popsci.com/node/24698

>>It's like a haircut. It's a lot easier to go one way than the other.

Depends. If we find economical means to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere, we could probably cool the planet faster than we can heat it with fossil fuels. Especially if you get into geoengineering.

For example - http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/new-material-can-pull-carbon-dioxide-right-out-air-unprecedented-rates

It's quite possible to do this. See this video of quantum-locked magnetic levitation. And this one, with an actual levitating skateboard.

It looks like the people behind this video cheaped out and didn't actually build the thing, which is lame.

I'd guess the plane-carried ABM lasers could fry a satellite in actual Star Wars style as well, if that program happened to be funded by whatever administration was in charge during the war - that's some really impressive technology.

The technology necessary to fry a satellite is much less impressive, and much older, than the sort of lasers we are finally seeing today. The plane-carried ABM lasers needed to be portable (obviously) because they needed to be carried where they could target the launch sites, where the ICBM is still slow and has lots of propellant to catch on fire. In order to get a high-powered laser in a package a (very large) plane would carry they use chemical based lasers that produce very high power pulses but have a limited number of shots.

Frying a GPS satellite is a lot easier, you do it from a ground station, so you have access to way more power and larger machinery (if you wanted to take out a satellite over China, and not over you then you'd need to put this on a ship or something), and you don't need a high-powered laser. We aren't vaporizing anything, we're just gently warming it. When people think lasers they are thinking something like this recent video, where a laser melts through a car hood and (supposedly) the engine underneath. That's totally overkill for what you need though, the boiling temperature of aluminum is 2467 degrees Celsius, heating a satellite to a hundred degrees Celsius would be more than enough, and while that takes more energy than the above video shows (larger mass being heated) it takes way less power, because you don't need to do it in two seconds, three hours is fine.

You actually don't need a laser at all, really any spectrum of light you throw out there will do. An old (in both senses of the word) coworker of mine told me that one of the Apollo missions was landing near an existing instrument on the moon that transmitted on the same frequency of one of the Apollo commands. They didn't have the ability to remotely turn off the device so they just pointed a very powerful antenna at it and broadcast noise until they were sure it was dead. No citation for that unfortunately, but I would love one if someone else knows of this.

http://www.popsci.com/

Clearly, you do not know what a neutrino is or how it is detected.

Please read the fucking article. The first paragraph is:
Neutrinos [are] special little things. They speed through the planet, and through you, and through everything; but, chargeless and puny, they interact with their surroundings so minimally that other particles hardly take notice.

Here is the link again http://www.popsci.com/node/59071/?cmpid=enews121511:

Of course, this decay of diamonds doesn't have to be slow; a blow-torch will speed it up quite a bit:
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-08/burn-diamonds-torch-and-liquid-oxygen

Note that cubic zirconia is immune to blow-torches, plus it costs less and looks better.

Of course, this is never going to work north of some point. Not just Alaska.

You are a troll and a hater and your information is wrong.
Chemical battery backup of a city in Alaska have already proven to be a viable alternative alternative and is cheaper than allowing for things to break because of the cold. There is also a city in Texas with battery backup.
Please google for five seconds before claiming "absolute truths", or preferably; please die.

Surround this with one of those sound-wave invisibility metamaterials, and the earthquake can just pass around it, without affecting it.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-09/fermilab-physicists-will-help-check-revolutionary-faster-light-claim

FermiLab at least seems to believe they can check it. Admittedly, from what I've read they plan to use old data to check it which is a little sketch from the whole scientific method standpoint.

i heard that they are considering allowing DOTanything. this could wreak havoc with the domain name service and the entire flow of the Internet for that matter.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/new-wave-domain-names-approved-could-include-everything-apple-zebra

Came here to see if any had posted this. Total rip-off. He was at this point over 4 years ago.
Article from 2008 here: http://www.popsci.com/node/21644

What if planes were all equipped with those new laser cannons? Laser up gets laser down, only with 10,000 times the power. Now *that* would put a stop to the problem!

Or, hey!, if we just stopped arguing over stupid shit, and started to work together for the benefit of all of us, why then we could get busy and build the tubes that would eliminate most air travel. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlantic-maglev

Yeah right...