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Plants are much more efficient at converting light into energy (in the form of sugar) than the most efficient solar panel ever created.

Interesting, so now we have TWO big breakthroughs in how to make electronics in the future. photonics and
spintronics.

Photonics or spintronics, any experts willing to guess which will be the dominant technology in the future?

That's one of the theories. Scientific American has a writeup of several current ideas in cosmology.

That's one of the theories. Scientific American has a writeup of several current ideas in cosmology.

Plus other articles on the web.

--jeff++

Not necessarily.

Logic is a wonderful, powerful tool. But to do good mathematics demands not just mastery of logic but a knack for unexpected insights as well.

There's actually an article in the february Scientific American about organic displays, though it talks more about organic leds and not really electronic ink. Still, a pretty interesting read, which has been kindly been placed online at the Sci Am website here

Apparently the future is finally here.

How about Scientific American?

I'd say they're as objective as you get, unless of course you believe in some kind of "science-conspiracy"..

There's no need for a one way trip, there is Mars Direct.

Mars direct was devised by an aerospace engineer called Robert Zubrin a few years ago in response to the previous Bush's original estimate of the cost of sending humans to Mars. Bush's administration devised a plan whereby a giant spaceship would be constructed in Earth orbit. This spaceship would package together everything required for a trip to and from Mars, and a stay of a few months.

Mars Direct proposes a multi-stage approach whereby the required supplies, infrastructure etc. are sent over several years. It is safer, has more redundancy, allows a longer stay on the surface, and best of all, it's cheaper. Much cheaper. The cost of the original plan was estimated by NASA to be $400 billion (1989, unadjusted.) When researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center considered Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal, they decided to be generous, and scale it up by a factor of 2. The ultimate cost still only came out at $50 billion dollars.

Mars direct can be implemented now, using current technology, with no need to leave people on Mars, and no exotic propulsion methods. Of course, with the development of more exotic nuclear propulsion methods, the cost can probably be brought down even further, and the travel times reduced.

Mars Direct could constitute as little as 20% of NASA's annual budget if implemented. This means that by retiring the Space Shuttle, and ending the commitment to the ISS, Mars Direct could probably fit within NASA's current budget.

Any NASA plans to send humans to Mars will almost certainly emcompass elements of Zubrin's Mars Direct plan.

For more info

For a more recent critique of the plan

- Weapons against the mind: Electromagnetic Weapons and Mind Control from CNN's Special Assignment, anno 1985 (which litterally tells: in Soviet Russia, weapons control YOU)

- Controlling Robots with the Mind

- ... and an old Slashdot article :-)

Science wasn't the only source to report about these Hawaiian squids. When I commented about this on my blog three days ago, I was mentioning other articles from Scientific American or Ananova. In particular, Scientific American said that this small squid has "a built-in flashlight made up of a previously unknown type of protein," that the authors of the study *dubbed* "reflectin". I'm not sure if this will lead to future nanolight tools, but at least it's *very intriguing* and Ananova reports that "the structure of the reflecting plates could offer inspiration to nanotechnology designers." My blog contains more details and includes a picture of the cute three-inch-long Hawaiian bobtail squid.

> Considering the data on which the global warming theory is based is statistically dubious at best, i'll treat this report as something less than gospel...

Lots of species are already having problems because the earlier springs are putting the birth times of predators out of sync with the birth times of their prey, leaving too little food to sustain historical population sizes.

See the most recent Scientific American, if you dare.

No matter how well trained, dogs have common sense and feel fear. Robots wouldn't unless we programmed them to.

there was an article in last months Sci Am about robot fear and that it is a needed trait.
article here

Thinking just about classical computing (ie. not quantum) here's my back-of-the envelope calculation for a "long-enough" (uncrackable) key:

The universe is estimated(!) to contain 10^100 or B=2^332 bits of information. If all that information were dedicated to brute-forcing a length L key it would take

B = L 2^L

to store all possible keys.

If that's right then the universe could never brute force a key longer than L=324 bits.

God uses 324-bit encryption and that's good enough for me! :P

there is also a scientific american article

The idea, of course, is to put the making of a fermented beverage under the microscope of science, but I see by the above posts that the discussion has degenerated into another US vs. Euro pissing match. Hmph.

If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous--they may actually be good for you at low levels.

From: Scientific American.

Does any of this take the following into consideration? I'm just wondering since I only remember hearing about this in mid-late December.

Soot More Culpable in Climate Warming Than Expected

We change the environment with our activity daily. The Earth's atmosphere is in a relative chaotic balance, the original phenomenon studied by Lorenz when he first described chaos, in terms of strange attractors. We have to contend with the volcanism *also*, but there's nothing we can do about them. Yeah, I have feelings about greenhouse denial, which threatens my future as they kill the sky. Where do you get your blithe, upbeat attitude? Or your socalled "science"?

There's plenty of published stuff about this.. research in Adenovirus cancer therapy has been going on since the mid-80's. Scientific American recently published a nice article summarizing adenovirus vs. tumor research that very clearly demonstrates how a treatment might work.

There's plenty of published stuff about this.. research in Adenovirus cancer therapy has been going on since the mid-80's. Scientific American recently published a nice article summarizing adenovirus vs. tumor research that very clearly demonstrates how a treatment might work.

Just because it's not lysing non-cancerous cells doesn't mean it can't infect them

Yes

And it's 'possible' to use relativity to travel backwards too. See wormholes.

From the Scientific American web site: an article describing the following patent:

Method of Treating Chest Pain, Patent 6,457,474, Carl E. Hanson of St. Paul, Minn. This inventor has patented lime juice to replace nitroglycerin as a treatment for chest pain such as angina pectoris. Making the patented invention requires only modest skill. "Limeade in non-concentrated form," according to the document, "was prepared by opening a can of the Minute Maid brand Premium All Natural Frozen Concentrate for Limeade, removing the contents and placing it in a pitcher, adding approximately 52 fluid ounces (about 4.5 cans) of tap water to the frozen concentrate and stirring.

"The pitcher was placed in the refrigerator so that the contents would cool. I drank approximately 2 to 3 glasses of limeade daily and did not notice the reoccurrence of chest pain." The lime juice can also be administered intravenously or by the angina sufferer's placing the frozen concentrate directly into his or her mouth. "The present invention is advantageous in that a patient can easily determine if the medicine is properly ingested. Lime juice has a very noticeable taste that disappears after it leaves the mouth. Since the juice is regularly stored in the refrigerator or freezer, it can be quickly located by the patient, particularly at nighttime where the refrigerator light plays a helpful role."

The gales of laughter must have reached the Patent Office, because the Director ordered the patent to be re-examined, which I assume means that it will be revoked. It is now apparent that you can file a patent on a ham sandwich and the Patent Office will issue it.

The polis is not responsible if they have been lied to. They are responsible for not learning the lessons of history, and not knowing a liar when they see one, or even more importantly being complicit in that lie to serve their own fears.

In response to the orginal issue of radiation why not wall paper the inside of the ship with Demron for the outside use a the foam/armid lamiante process developed for the Cassini probe. All of it could be made out of plyable frabrics the assempled in space. No metal, so its easy to bring up on ship rolled up in bolts of cloth, the foam can come up as a liquid. Just a big ass micrometor and radiation proof ball with a truster on one end. Let it spin and even hav a parital G for the ride.

Recently published, definitive research shows that human workweek activity causes significant temperature variations, so there's no denying that we're an immediate factor in our climate. The 1990s were the hottest decade in history, featuring the majority of history's top 10 hottest years, despite the many cold winters. Other symptoms are droughts, floods, high winds, more/stronger tornadoes, etc. It's obvious that the climate is becoming more chaotic, twistier and less predictable, even if "warming" is only one component of the dynamic environment. We're not looking for culprits blame, or we'd be going after the devil that sends us volcanoes with their greenhouse plumes. No, we're looking for the factors that we *can* control, like emissions. Because if we don't exercise self control, the deadly emerging climate will control *us* into extinction. Unless you're getting checks from a coal plant you're protecting, get with the program and help stop them from killing the sky first, and then you a bit later.

For dolts (like me) who had no clue what antimatter really is, I found this article over at Scientific American that gives a good overview and explains what exactly (and why) antimatter is. It's readable, too, to a non-physics geek.

--trb

The Mars Direct plan contradicts you. Read more.

I met Zubrin once. He's a hyper-smart guy, and he's got the right plan. Why are we jacking around in LEO?

Method of Treating Chest Pain, Patent 6,457,474, Carl E. Hanson of St. Paul, Minn. This inventor has patented lime juice to replace nitroglycerin as a treatment for chest pain such as angina pectoris. Making the patented invention requires only modest skill. "Limeade in non-concentrated form," according to the document, "was prepared by opening a can of the Minute Maid brand Premium All Natural Frozen Concentrate for Limeade, removing the contents and placing it in a pitcher, adding approximately 52 fluid ounces (about 4.5 cans) of tap water to the frozen concentrate and stirring.

"The pitcher was placed in the refrigerator so that the contents would cool. I drank approximately 2 to 3 glasses of limeade daily and did not notice the reoccurrence of chest pain." The lime juice can also be administered intravenously or by the angina sufferer's placing the frozen concentrate directly into his or her mouth. "The present invention is advantageous in that a patient can easily determine if the medicine is properly ingested. Lime juice has a very noticeable taste that disappears after it leaves the mouth. Since the juice is regularly stored in the refrigerator or freezer, it can be quickly located by the patient, particularly at nighttime where the refrigerator light plays a helpful role."

The gales of laughter must have reached the Patent Office, because the Director ordered the patent to be re-examined, which I assume means that it will be revoked.

Patent FAT? You could file a patent on fat thighs and the Patent Office would issue it.

How is this a submarine patent? And why is it moderated as "5: Interesting"? It wasn't interesting, or anything else for that matter. How about "5: Uninformed"? "5: Ignorant" perhaps? Anyway, here's an article that explains what submarine patents are, since you apparently don't know.

Some other over looked -- way out ideas.

No Anti-Gravity Speculation?

The Anti-Gravity by Spinning Super-Conductor: Seems to be clocking in at 3 cuckoos by my estimate

However

Gravity Wave Detection and coupling to Electromagnetic Fields: a 1 cuckoo currently, but could go higher or lower in the
near future with new experiments.

Multiple Universes: I'd give this a zero, but experimental confirmation is going to be a real bitch.

Dark Mater: a zero cuckoo for sure, but we haven't really seen the damn stuff yet.

Brane Collision origin of the universe: 1 to 2 cuckoos, but could gain respectability. Less violent than Big Bang, less
inflation, but still an abrupt origin in the 10-20 Billion Year range.

String Theory: a zero cuckoo. It's hard to bet against a theory that just keeps changing, refining, and redefining itself.
In the end String Theory will probably be the GUT, but by then will probably have no strings :-)

Underlining process to Universe are computational: Main premis to Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science." I like Stephen, and even use to work for him, but he has a long way to go before being able to claim a truly "New Kind of Science." I'd say 1 cuckoo.

Cold Fusion: I'd give it 2 cuckoos (these guys just won't go away)

Homeopathic Medicine: I'd give this one a 5 on the 4 cuckoo scale.

MOND Modified Newtonian Dynamics: 1 cuckoo probably, but could really upset the apple cart in physics. Has even had write ups in Scientific American
see
Where's the Dark Matter?

These are just a few off the top of my head, I look forward to seeing some other Slashdotters lists.

I hope you mean it's not significant to you. Current estimates of the energies of large impacts are very crude. It would take the world's entire nuclear arsenal to simulate just one, and the complex nature of large craters (multiple rings, central peaks) means our knowledge of smaller craters doesn't scale up well. The presence of this mineral gives an indication of the pressure and temperature under the impact site, and therefore a guess at the original energy of the explosion.

How's this important? It could tell us what mass and orbital velocity are necessary to make an asteroid an impact threat. If it turns out that even smaller rocks than we thought can create devastating explosions, it means we would probably have to throw a whole lot more money into telescopes to track them. On a related note, Scientific American's Nov. issue has an article on asteroid tugboats.

These zig-zags add length to the traces so that they have the same length as other traces within the same bus, and all the signals on that bus arrive at the same time... Power consumption is also related... Stray capacitance and inductance...slow their ability to switch instantaneously.

It's still a research problem, but businesses are looking in to it.

Looks like they're trying to take the load off of their Cold Fusion server by serving plain HTML. The link I was redirected to is http://www.sciam.com/giftguide_1.html. Can someone add this link to my original article?

The page is still very slow. Perhaps this will get them to clean the junk off their pages, it's getting to look like a spam site.

Rick DeBay

Scientific American has this article as well. I admit, i'm still scratching my head over it after reading it when i got the paper version last month...

There's a short article about this property of light in this month's edition of Scientific American. Apparently this propery isn't new but rather largely ignored.

Actually, June's Scientific American had an interesting article on The Dawn of Physics beyond the Standard Model.

It's too bad the full text of this article is available only for subscribers :(

Actually, June's Scientific American had an interesting article on The Dawn of Physics beyond the Standard Model.

It's too bad the full text of this article is available only for subscribers :(

You gotta remember to take out the space inserted by slashcode:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0005CCF 5-D9D7-1CF6-93F6809EC5880000

Sorry for the bad links.
Here is the Scientific American article.
Here again is the Byte Magazine article.

Here are some excerpts from the first article that talk about how to develop the algorithm:

We also began to consider ways of tuning the evaluation function's 120 or so parameters, specified in software. Traditionally, programmers had hand-tuned the weights that programs assigned to material--pawns and pieces-- and to positional considerations. We believe ours is the only major program to tune its own weights automatically.

We acquired 900 sample master games and arbitrarily defined the optimum weights as those that produce the best match between the moves the machine judges to be best and those that the masters actually played. The software part of the evaluation function was completely rewritten by Campbell and Nowatzyk to reflect this strategy. Instead of just assigning a final numerical value to each position, the evaluation function--in its tuning mode--returns an equation containing a string of linear terms. In other words, it produces a vector.

Two tuning mechanisms were used. The first, which is called hill climbing, simply sets a given evaluation parameter at an arbitrary value and then performs, say, a five- or six-ply search on every position in the game data base to find the moves that the machine would play. It then adjusts the parameter and recalculates. If the number of matches between the computer's choices and the grandmaster's choice should increase, then the parameter is adjusted again in the same direction. The process continues until all the parameters have reached their highest level of performance. It would take years to optimize all the parameters by this method, however, and so we used it only in a few diffcult cases.

The second tuning mechanism, proposed and implemented by Nowatzyk, was much quicker. It evolved from the simple notion of finding the best fit between the function of the machine's evaluation of positions and their presumed true values. The best fit provides the lowest average squared value of the error between the model and the true value. True values can be approximated, for these purposes, by the results returned from deep searches (if a known concept is being fine-tuned) or by comparing machine decisions with those of first-rate human players.

Actually, what you're talking about, virotherapy for cancer, is being researched right now, as we speak. See this Scientific American article.

Cancerous cells different from normal cells. Most of them are killed by our immunological systems and only those more "clever" can form tumors.

The cancer attacking viruses may exploit different receptors on the cancer cells.

Article in Scientific American.

I dunno, I'm no doctor but I'm willing to bet that being violently raped a few times in prison would certainly help reverse some of that irreversible brain chemistry. If for nothing else I am certain that it would make some of these rapists think twice about what they're doing. Yes they have these urges but after being the victim of their own crime they very well might decide to try harder to resist the urges.

I knew I was going to get dinged for not posting a link but the research I'm talking about was in a Scientific American article and only the first two paragraphs are available. The work has indicated that the physical development of the brain gets screwed up when a child is subjected to abuse. Once those neural pathways are set, they're pretty much unchangable.

You're bringing up a much larger issue of free will which is outside the scope of this discussion but is important nonetheless so I'm not dismissing what you are saying.

I tend to agree but as I get older and see more and more bullshit babying and coddling of the convicted and worrying more about them than their victims I tend to start thinking that these people deserve some of their own medicine.

I think we all have that little part inside of us that feels that way. However, I believe it is important to construct laws and take action based on a rational, calm response and we must all strive to keep the reactionary, violent, aggressive thoughts that eminate from the so-called "reptillian" part of our brain under control.

GMD

Mann, Bradley & Hughes (authors of the definitive 1998 study attacked by McIntyre and McKitrick) responded today with:

"McIntyre and McKitrick ("MM") have [...] used neither the data nor the procedures of MBH98. Thus, it is entirely understandable that they do not obtain the same result. Their effort has no bearing on the work of MBH98, and is no way a "correction" of that study as they claim. On the contrary, their analysis appears seriously flawed and amounts to a gross misrepresentation of the work of MBH98."

Scientific observers await the peer review of the MM publication to determine whose science-fu is stronger. Meanwhile, greenhouse deniers have yet to pull rabbits out of their (*ahem*) hats to explain how the Workweek Causes Climate Changes. Or they can join Timothy in celebrating propaganda like the obviously corrupt Economist. Just remember to wear your sunscreen.

I read last week in printed edition an article exactly about this subject, there are an on-line version too:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=00023290-03BC-1F5D-905980A84189E EDF

This article, the summary, and I don't think anyone who has posted a comment has seemed to realize that this is an engineered virus. Oncolytics Biotech has been making these alongside several other companies. Adenovirus is also used.

By changing either surrounding the virus in carefully chosen antibodies or, by changing it's genetic structure accordingly, they are able to make it only infect cancerous cells.

You can't just stick someone full of reovirus or adenovirus. They will die with the amounts given.

This is not natural, the article has mislead you.

There is a write up in the October 2003 issue of SciAm, here is the online version.

That creationist argument is debunked here (number 15):

"Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells."

= 9J =

We're likely to run out of breathable air before we run out of fossil fuels.

Wherever do you get that from? Optimistic, pro-oil sources claim "We won't run out for 90 years"! How anyone can say that running out of fuel in 2093 (when I fully expect to be still alive) is not a problem is beyond me!

Pessimists assume that China and India will start to consume oil in this century, and that their usage will run us out much faster. You must know a dangerous secret if you think the air will be destroyed in less than a century.

Now, of course we will never 100% run out of oil. As it gets rarer, the price will shoot up to 100s of dollars per liter, and nobody can afford it. The effect on society will be similar to a total loss of fossil fuel.

Math summary: There are 649 billion barrels worth of oil underground around the world (an optimistic view). Last year, the world burned 75 million barrels of oil each day. That's 8653 days left, or just 23 years. Obviously, one can dispute the accuracy of the source data- but even using MORE optimistic guesses about how much oil the world really contains, you shouldn't expect it to last more than another century or two.

unfortunately the superpowers are concerned primarily with just that.

Wherever do you get that from? Every big nation is pulling back from investment into nuclear energy, which besides fossil fuel is the only reliable source of major power. On the contrary, the US is now pushing for a $90,000,000,000 investment in Iraq's infrastructure, which is really an investment in oil extraction (the only thing Iraq is good for).