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Little reasoning is provided.

This shows you haven't dug very deeply into his work. And I get it - at a surface glance it does appear to fly in the face of some things that are widely accepted now. But don't forget the luminiferous aether was widely accepted.

I think I can give you the gist of his argument, or at least maybe some food for thought.

The Casimir force has been experimentally verified fairly well at this point. Would you agree with that statement? If so I have another related thought.

The Casimir force arises from virtual particle pairs not being allowed to form in a small space in between two metal plates, making a sort of vacuum. The particle pairs on the outside are more numerous resulting in a net pressure.

Here's the important bit. At what range does this effect stop?

In other words, if the plates are a micron apart we have Casimir forces. Do we have them at a range of an inch? A foot? A light year? And if so what would the consequences be?

That's really all Dr. McCulloch's work is. What if Casimir forces are summed up over a Hubble scale?

Coffee is 0.5% -1.5% dissolved solids. Nowhere near what is needed to elevate boiling temp by 10 deg C at sea level.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.ph... Didn't observe 1/2 that in extract concentrates that were 30-40% disolved solids.

180-190 F is what McDonald's served coffee at, which is still hot enough to cause nearly immediate burns.

"For some reason, apart from the archaeopteryx (which is a far older fossil), the feathered dinosaurs all seem to have lived in that one area in present day China."

It's a preservational effect. There aren't many places in the world that have the right sort of preservation for feathers. Solnhofen in Germany, where the Archaeopteryx specimens are from, is one such place, but feather impressions in general are very rare (e.g., even in Solnhofen there are ~11 specimens in a couple of centuries of quarrying the limestones). The only other Jurassic or Cretaceous location I can think of is the Crato Formation in Brazil, which has convincing feathers [PDF], but they are isolated specimens (not attached to a body) and so far there haven't been any decently-preserved dinosaur specimens found there, just the occasional bone (suggesting a lot of decay of the dinosaur before they got buried, so little chance of preservation of any feathers, if present). People have made the case that some of those isolated feathers were from dinosaurs, but until they're found directly associated, that's debatable. I think there are a couple of other places in the world where isolated feathers have been found in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, but so far the *connected* specimens (i.e. feathers *on* a body) are unique to a few locations in China. Maybe we'll get lucky someday, but these are long odds (feathers on a body) on top of long odds (preserving feathers at all).

In any case, there are plenty of specimens from China where there is no ambiguity about either where the specimen came from, that it is legitimate, or that the structures attached to the body are feathers (e.g., there are multiple specimens of Microraptor). If you mean the "archaeoraptor" specimen, yeah, it's bogus, but that's because it was cobbled together from pieces of more than one genuine specimen with genuine feather impressions, not because the feathers on there were completely faked. Some local artisan could try to add some feathers, but it would be found out pretty quickly, just like it was for "archaeoraptor" (the original paper was rejected from journals for publication). It's doubtful that you could add them on there in a way that was at all convincing.

Case in point: some of the feathered specimens from China have preserved melanosomes, on both the feathered dinosaurs and the birds. Good luck trying to fake that in a way that stands up to microscopic scrutiny.

That's due to gravity. Earth and Venus have about the same mass (ratio Venus/Earth ~ 0.8, while Mars/Earth ~ 0.1). According to my lecturer in astroparticle physics, the reason the magnetic field is important for us is indeed that it shields us quite a bit from the solar wind which is responsible for most of the cosmic rays (up to 10^9 - 10^10 eV). If it weren't for the magnetic field, these particles would interact with the atmosphere and mess it up pretty bad, and we'd end up with an atmosphere like Venus (I'm to lazy to search for sources now, so you'll just have to decide whether you'll take my word for it or not). There are still cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere, but they are generally of higher energy and have a much smaller flux (as seen in this plot. )

Easy, pure water boils at 100 degrees celsius and freezes at 0. However, anything added to pure water (e.g Coffee or salt) would affect both the boiling point and the freezing point.

As it happens, people have done studies on the effect of boiling with various coffee concentrations, but my chemistry knowledge has been replaced with programming knowledge, so I couldn't decipher the results if I wanted to :-)

Stimulants, including caffeine, can indeed exacerbate anxiety in some people, but they are a minority of users. For most, stimulants improve concentration and task performance. A fairly interesting recent study detailing some of the mechanics and effects of caffeine is here.

Personally though, it's been my observation most people are prone to anxiety when having blood drawn or given an injection; I'm not necessarily sure that warrants medication.

Caffeine also has another interaction with this test in that it triggers the release of acetylcholine, and therefore possibly acetylcholinase as part of a negative feedback process as well. I assume nicotine would do much the same thing. Even if neither influenced the subject's behavior anxiety score.

Utimately, such research has the potential for saving a lot more lives, but giving tools to smart people who do not live in the rich countries.