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Other research at Texas A&M University shows indications that violent/action video games actually may increase pro-social behavior and civic engagement.

Perhaps the kind of inflammatory and socially divisive rhetoric put out by publishing flawed studies that prove nothing shows a lack of empathy on the part of the publishers, and antisocial self indulgence on the part of the researchers, both groups apparently fomenting further division in an already overly fractionated society.

Let's get some research on how we can really empathize. - by learning to accept and live gracefully amongst others with possibly diametrically opposing views, instead of trying to homogenize our species out of existence.

In general, China is underexplored paleontologically compared to, say, Europe or North America. That's not a unique feature (there are many places around the world that have underexplored territory), but China has some very important sites, such as Chengjiang in the Cambrian and the various Jurassic-Cretaceous lake basins, including the area of Liaoning that has yielded most of the feathered dinosaurs from the Yixian Formation and other units, not to mention many other well-preserved fossils.

Because China has significant paleontological resources, and China's study of paleontology is at an early stage of development, it is commonplace for western scientists and Chinese paleontologists to team up in order to study a particular site or find. The authorship of the paper (which you correctly identify as being in the journal Cretaceous Research) indicates that Hone (the lead author) was studying in China at the time the paper was published, and the news article and the paper indicates he is now at Dublin (in the paper: "Corresponding author current address: School of Biology & Environmental Sciences, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland", versus "Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Systematics of Vertebrates, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 643, Beijing 100044, People's Republic of China" for the location at the time it was written). The reason the European gets the headline is that the journalism article was printed in the The Telegraph, a UK publication, so he was the one they could easily talk to; and because he is first author, implying that he was the leader of the study in a scientific sense. When Chinese authors write important papers those *do* get noted in the western media as well.

This touches on some pretty sensitive subjects, but because you asked specifically about it ...

In my experience publications by Chinese scientists are highly variable in quality. Some papers are really good, especially when published in well-known journals (those are the ones that usually get mentioned in the media), but the Chinese literature itself has a pretty mediocre standard: it's prolific, but not always done well. For example, there's a real tendency to generate many more new species names than is probably justified. However, the standards are getting better over time. Like most things it's a learning process, and as you have correctly inferred, China is still in early stages of developing its paleontology to the same standard as other parts of the world. Even in a couple of decades there has been considerable improvement.

The bargain for getting access to some of the sites in China is also as you have suggested: that the Chinese paleontologists involved will learn from the paleontologists visiting from elsewhere. The visiting scientists get much out of the exchange too.

Who is natalie portman?

One of the authors of this paper.

but, there's a reason why polygraphs aren't admissible in many places in court. It's vague and subjective in a lot of cases.

Not to mention unsupported by actual science, with strong criticism levelled at the methods of most studies that support their validity.

but, there's a reason why polygraphs aren't admissible in many places in court. It's vague and subjective in a lot of cases.

Not to mention unsupported by actual science, with strong criticism levelled at the methods of most studies that support their validity.

Wow, don't know how one, in this day and age can ask such a question about wind power. Usually energy payback time is about half a year, normally much less than one year.
Google for "life cycle assessment" and "payback time". One paper (don't know if you have access to it) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4S-4SXRY9P-1&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2009&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=gateway&_origin=gateway&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1668513745&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=6bf8832e828ebf39026090fa3d059b50&searchtype=a
A presentation based on it: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.rpi.edu/cfes/news-and-events/Wind%2520Workshop/An%2520Environmental%2520Life%2520Cycle%2520Analysis%2520of%2520Wind%2520Power.pdf&chrome=true (page 12)

If you note, their sample involves *anhydrous* silicagel based aerogel, which would not be indicative of silica aerogel that is being employed as home insulation.

The silica gel would absorb water due to it's high hygroscopic tendencies, and then lose a lot of the IR transparency they are discussing.
As seen here

Also, Carbon aerogels are another beast entirely, and are EXTREMELY IR opaque.

It really depends on the conditions for the light too. Light can go as slow as 38 mph.

The fastest seismic velocity in the crust is about(rounding up) 8Km/s, That's less then 5mph.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V72-4DYW4Y1-2&_user=10&_coverDate=01/06/2005&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1655121280&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=5aecbbb1fcd399679228d1a35bda3872&searchtype=a

I have yet to see one single study that finds economical benefits in using DST

Have you even bothered to search for them?

• The impact on energy consumption of daylight saving clock changes
• More daylight, less electricity

The cliff notes of any study on the impact of implementing a daylight savings time in England shows that it helps save between 0.3% and 0.5%, which corresponds to around 0.6% of England's daily energy expenses (the relation between energy production and its' cost is non-linear)

I have yet to see one single study that finds economical benefits in using DST

Have you even bothered to search for them?

• The impact on energy consumption of daylight saving clock changes
• More daylight, less electricity

The cliff notes of any study on the impact of implementing a daylight savings time in England shows that it helps save between 0.3% and 0.5%, which corresponds to around 0.6% of England's daily energy expenses (the relation between energy production and its' cost is non-linear)

The very first link (February Acts & Facts PDF ) on the very first website (Acts&Facts) on the above referenced page contains an analysis: "Molecular Equidistance: The Echo of Discontinuity?" (page 4) It lays out a methodology, a set of predictions and a proposed metric for testing the hypothosis. You give the impression that you have not examined the first thing about this, but came in with your mind made up. I must say that I really expected better of a Slashdot reader.

So where's their experiment? Where's their data? They just point at one thing, ask a couple of leading questions, and then speculate about what it could mean. They do no investigation. They don't apparently even attempt to answer their own questions. They offer no support for their speculation about what it means. That's what you think is science? Pointing at something you don't understand and then saying it probably means whatever you feel like it should mean? Wow. That guy is either very intellectually lazy, or he actually looked into the questions and didn't like the answers he found, so decided to just imply that he was onto something.

Page 14 presents a theory (new to me) about a second time dilation proposed by Dr. Russel Humphreys to correspond to the period of the flood. (I was familiar with "Starlight and Time, Humphrey's original publication on the subject of time dilation, but not with his later work.)

That second article is pretty lame, and certainly not scientific. He makes so many unsupported assumptions that the whole thing is merely speculation. Take his use of helium diffusion in zircons as a dating method. He offers nothing to justify any of his assumptions about it. Nor does he give any justification for not using an established method, other than that it didn't give him the answer he wanted I guess. His method has also been addressed and found wanting by others. If you're going to put forth a theory on something, you need to be able to explain conflicting evidence, and explain why your theory is better. If you don't directly address evidence that contradicts your theory, you aren't being intellectually honest.

Additionally, his work on quantized redshifts was largely based on very small studies from the 70s, where selection bias seems to be an issue. More current, and much larger studies do not agree with his conclusions. As always, the work is ongoing.

First the point on funding, the figures and pdf that you cited did not mention the other funding sources available to nuclear power. Some of them are;

2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies via revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) which was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash.

Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies for procuring companies (usually oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do.

Also Nuclear power needs a special insurance construct to be allowed to operate, this comes in the form of re-authorising the Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money (closer to a trillion if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose in the event of an actual accident). Now I know this is insurance underwriting but no other industry needs a special legislative act just to exist.

Additionally assessments of the financial viability of Nuclear Power from some organistions;

Standard and Poor's assessment of the Nuclear industry's financial viability "the industry's legacy of cost growth, technological problems, cumbersome political and regulatory oversight, and the newer risks brought about by competition and terrorism keep credit risk too high for even federal legislation that provides loan guarantees to overcome"

an assessment supported by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs "even with an explicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear power plants cannot be economical without government subsidies"

So it's not really a meme, there is just more to it than apparent on the surface.

Even being generous, I'd say wind probably covers at least 2 orders of magnitude more land area per MW than nuclear.

Indeed, The difference is that the area occupied by wind farming can still be used for farming whereas the area mined for uranium contains radioactive isotopes that have to be contained in the area. Acid leech mining has greatly reduce the surface area that Uranium mining takes even though it is illegal in Russia and the United States it is carried out in Australia. Further Wind power does not need to draw upon of be located near a large water source, as is the case with most nuclear power plants.

That's roughly the same as demolishing 10-30 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, not a single building. And they're spread over >1000 km^2.

The point is the energy expenditure on demolishing a nuclear power plant. I'll explain.

The IPCC 4th assessment report, working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply". In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary sources. However the conclusions reached in that chapter are based on Vattenfall and they build nuclear power plants so it's not surprising the results favor nuclear power. Whilst they are the best run nuclear reactors in the world and an example of what a *baseline* nuclear program should look like, U.S reactors fall dreadfully short.

The work of Vattenfall *and* Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, upon which that chapter cites as references, both use the same method to calculate energy consumption funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and are used in 80 odd industry sectors. The exceptionally detailed work of Dr Phillip Smith, Nuclear Physicist and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (MSc) (Stormsmith.nl), who both work in the nuclear indust

And, bearing that size in mind, a quick back of the envelope suggests that 1 MW is the input power of the light, not the delivered power of the laser. A quick search doesn't turn up any papers or detailed articles relating to this solar tower specifically, but other examples of such solar-pumped NdYAG lasers suggest a conversion efficiency of about 10 W laser power/m^2 of mirror, or about 1% of the incident radiation [1].

So, assuming that lasing efficiency for this system, this is not a 1 MW CW laser, but a 10 kW CW laser pumped with over a megawatt of input power, which necessitates significant cooling to keep the thing from melting. Compared to traditional laser designs, this is still not that impressive, especially given the effort involved in its manufacture.

[1] A solar-pumped Nd:YAG laser in the high collection efficiency regime

... I've thought a bit more about that question of if photons of light have inertia. While they do have momentum, I am more convinced now that they don't have inertia. One can define inertia as the resistance of mass to changes in velocity, right? The root cause of this classic Newtonian mechanic is the interaction of objects with the Higgs field, right? That's what grants particles inertia. But photons do not interact with the Higgs field, so they don't have inertia. [ShakaUVM]

I've never taken graduate-level elementary particle physics, so I don't know much about the Higgs field. My classmates who have taken those classes and moved on to work at the LHC tell me that most theorists consider the discovery of the Higgs boson to be very likely.

Personally, I'm not sure how to rule out the notion that inertia is caused by viewing zero point energy in an accelerating reference frame. I'm sure the Higgs field really is more likely to be the cause of inertia, but right now I don't have enough time to wade through the relevant literature to learn why.

Anyway, you're right to say that the "inertial mass" of an object can be measured by placing it in a container and determining how much force is necessary to accelerate the container. Or, rather, how much extra force is necessary compared to experiments performed when the container is empty.

Now imagine a one dimensional container with perfectly reflective inner walls. I claim that if this container is filled with photons having total energy E, then more force would be needed to accelerate the container after filling it. More precisely, the experiment would show that the container has an extra "inertial mass" E/c^2 compared to its empty state.

Here's why.

If the container isn't accelerating, the trapped photons will exert equal pressure on both walls of the container as they're reflected back and forth, just as with solar sails. Accelerating the container, though, will cause the mirror on the bottom to reflect those photons more often than the mirror on the top. Thus on average the bottom mirror will experience more pressure than the top mirror, and this pressure asymmetry will mimic an "inertial mass" of E/c^2.

In fact, I think any method of measuring inertial mass would conclude that photons have inertia. That's because active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which includes the energy (and momentum) in electromagnetic fields. Active and passive gravitational masses need to be equal to conserve momentum, and the equivalence principle says that passive gravitational mass equals inertial mass.

In other words, the container curves spacetime more when it's filled with photons. Therefore its gravitational mass has increased, and via the equivalence principle so has its inertial mass.

This depends on my interpretation of the equivalence principle (and the principle itself) being correct. It also implies that pressure has inertia, because pressure contributes to the stress energy tensor. Interestingly, that implies tension has negative inertia because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short

Now factor in the simple fact that all leaked hydrogen will naturally rise through the atmosphere to the ozone layer, and that ozone is naturally "hypergolic" with hydrogen --the two chemicals instantly react

Not quite, although you clearly know enough chemistry to have confused yourself, or accepted someone else's confusion.

Molecular hydrogen is far shorter lived in the atmosphere than inert CFCs. That's why CFCs were such a problem - they hang around in the troposphere long enough to mix up into the stratosphere. Molecular hydrogen is for the most part scrubbed out by the hydroxyl radical (OH) in the troposphere (via H2 + OH --> H2O + H and bacterial decomposition by soil).

So, any effect of hydrogen leaks on stratospheric ozone has to do with increased water vapour rather than direct reaction of H2 + O3. (Stratospheric water provides the surfaces required for ozone depletion reactions to take place on - polar stratospheric clouds - that's why water is important. See http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/ozone.html)

That's not really relevant, though, as estimates put the effect of even substantial hydrogen leaks on ozone depletion so small as makes no difference:

http://www.arp.harvard.edu/sci/climate/journalclub/Pyle.pdf

There was an earlier study claiming it was a problem, but that's basically been debunked, both by the paper above (which assumes there will be significant losses, but finds they don't affect stratospheric ozone) and - much more recently - this paper which estimates that losses will actually be very low, comparable to hydrogen production from our existing vehicles (yes, internal combustion engines release small amounts of hydrogen).

I am an atmospheric scientist, I am not your atmospheric scientist, etc...

What about the nouse?

Here's one. And two.

Phosphate fertilizers carry with them a lot of heavy metals (cadmium is mentioned in the first article) that gets picked up by the plant. These are ingested or inhaled as the plant is consumed.

What I didn't know until just now as I read up on this (mostly to back up my previous post) is that the preferred method of generating phosphorus for small volumes of fertilizer is from urine. This seems totally safe, at least from the heavy metals perspective. For large/industrial scale uses the only way to collect sufficient amounts of phosphorous is by mining it. This mined phosphorous ore is where the problem lies, because it's likely mined along with those heavy metals that cause long term health problems in people.

For small scale growers, urine phosphorous is just fine. But industrial scale phosphorous fertilizer can be a problem. Obviously, the scope of the problem depends on how much fertilized plant you inhale. It's one of the reasons cigarette smoke is so bad for you.

If these fertilizers are so toxic, then why are they being used on edible plants?

I'll close my response by saying that this is a very, very good question.

Here's one. And two.

Phosphate fertilizers carry with them a lot of heavy metals (cadmium is mentioned in the first article) that gets picked up by the plant. These are ingested or inhaled as the plant is consumed.

What I didn't know until just now as I read up on this (mostly to back up my previous post) is that the preferred method of generating phosphorus for small volumes of fertilizer is from urine. This seems totally safe, at least from the heavy metals perspective. For large/industrial scale uses the only way to collect sufficient amounts of phosphorous is by mining it. This mined phosphorous ore is where the problem lies, because it's likely mined along with those heavy metals that cause long term health problems in people.

For small scale growers, urine phosphorous is just fine. But industrial scale phosphorous fertilizer can be a problem. Obviously, the scope of the problem depends on how much fertilized plant you inhale. It's one of the reasons cigarette smoke is so bad for you.

If these fertilizers are so toxic, then why are they being used on edible plants?

I'll close my response by saying that this is a very, very good question.

Well, there is clear geological evidence that global sea level was lower by ~180m or so during the last Ice Age, and that sea level rose relatively rapidly between ~10000 and 8000 years ago to close to present-day levels as the continental ice sheets melted. The modern-day Persian Gulf is everywhere less than that, and most of it much less (~half of it is <50m, and I'm not sure any of it is >100m). Although a tectonically active area, the terrain hasn't shifted that much over such a geologically short period, so you can very confidently predict that during the last Ice Age it was exposed land, and that it drowned as global sea level rose. I found this paper by Stoffers and Ross (1979), which is about the Gulf of Oman and inferring what is happening "upstream" in the Persian Gulf from the sedimentation there, but you need access. This paper by Lambeck (1996) [pdf] is accessible. It lays out the geological case pretty well. But what's really needed is to go from archaeological speculation to actually finding sites on the sea floor. What they should do is swath bathymetry across the area, although it would probably be a bit of a mess to sort through all the modern ships, pipelines, and other structures produced from more recent activity.

Anyway, from a geological perspective, no, it isn't a crazy idea. But as far as I know archaeologists have done little to actually LOOK on the sea floor of the Persian Gulf.

Humans already synthesize a biomolecule that interacts with light sources. It's called Melanin.

Genetic engineering to utilize melanin to produce ATP would create natural evolutionary pressure to make humans darker colored, which might piss off certain "Ethnic purity" [cough, sputter] groups, but considering that being darkly colored is widely considered normal, and even attractive, I don't see this as being a problem.

From the parent comment: "I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one."

True. I really, really dislike it when stories about energy generation and distribution fail to include all the issues and costs. I found two articles about degradation of lithium cells:

Abstract: Highly reversible lithium metal secondary battery using a room temperature ionic liquid/lithium salt mixture and a surface-coated cathode active material Quote: "... the degradation of the LiCoO2 cathode-solid polymer electrolyte interface is dominant."

PDF file of the full paper: Building a Battery by Vapor Deposition Quote: "... aging for LiCoO2 cathodes cycled above 75C is associated with a trigonal to cubic transformation."

Reading those quotes seems to indicate that degraded batteries could be renewed, but only by taking them completely apart, re-processing the lithium, and building an entirely new battery.

Misleading: Quote from the story: "The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent..." Most of the inefficiency is in converting line power to the DC at high current necessary for the battery. Another area of inefficiency is in the transmission lines from the power station to the car. Talking about only one inefficiency is misleading to those who don't understand the technology.

It is a well known fact that there are far more emissions from diesel than a regular gasoline engine. That's why there are so few diesel cars available for sale in north america - they don't pass emission standards.

The only stinky, noisy, and smoke-spewing diesels I see fall into two categories: a) old & poorly maintained engines, and b) pickups owned by rednecks who think belching black smoke and making noise is "cool".

Really? Then why would there be scientific papers describing the problem of particulate emissions from diesel engines? It is a well known fact that there are far more emissions from diesel than a regular gasoline engine. That's why there are so few diesel cars available for sale in north america - they don't pass emission standards.

There is no significant difference in latency or duration for vertical vs. horizontal saccades (eg: see ), and you're dead wrong about reading speed: In English, the optimal column width for fast reading is somewhere between 50 and 100 characters per line, depending on exact circumstances.

However, there are two other relevant facts: 1) The lower visual hemifield has a larger cortical representation than the upper visual hemifield, and shows modest improvements in visual performance (this is unsurprising, since our hands/tools/ground near us is usually in our lower hemifield) and 2) We can move our head side-to-side more rapidly, and with a larger range of motion than we can up and down, which changes some saccade distributions.

Irregardless of the mechanics of the situation, reading is a highly trained activity, and direction of reading is not universal. Chinese, for instance, can be read top-to-bottom, or with either horizontal possibility as the initial direction, with the reader cued by slightly differing strokes and punctuation . I'm not aware of any bottom-to-top sequential reading in any culture, which is probably due to the above mentioned processing differences. However, there are also mixed reading sequences that use multiple horizontal and vertical elements in a single block, like Mayan hieroglyphs (2x2 blocks LR->TB within block, blocks are read TB->LR ) or the Korean Hangul system (variety of block sizes, read TB->RL). Arguably, the latter systems are most efficient in terms of leveraging the early geometry of the visual system (log-polar, with resolution dropping exponentially with distance from the fovea.

The core of the problem is that there are too many workers competing for jobs. In China, nobody forces you to work in one place any more since the economic reform. If you don't like your job for whatever reason, you can jump somewhere. But you will just find you won't be better off anywhere because there are simply too many people wanting a job. Today we have 9.6% unemployment rate and we are freaking out, China has higher (unofficial) unemployment for years. (The official figure is skewed as it does not count the millions of migrants.)

Tariff would work if they have no way to retaliate. If you raise tariff on their exports, they will, for example, raise tariff on your semiconductor chips, machines, and agricultural products (~$9 billion trade surplus from US.) They will also cut back on buying the Treasury bills.

Just to be clear, the signature in the ice cores isn't from some kind of scary ground-level radiation effect and it doesn't make the ice radioactive. It's from effects high in the atmosphere that eventually show up in the snowfall that is transformed into glacial ice. Specifically, solar protons are supposed to cause dissociation of nitrogen which then reforms into nitrates, and these get trapped in the ice. These papers have only the abstracts, but you can search for other literature from there. A search with "solar proton nitrates" finds all sorts of examples. There is still some debate about whether nitrates really are a reliable proxy for past solar activity.

Just to be clear, the signature in the ice cores isn't from some kind of scary ground-level radiation effect and it doesn't make the ice radioactive. It's from effects high in the atmosphere that eventually show up in the snowfall that is transformed into glacial ice. Specifically, solar protons are supposed to cause dissociation of nitrogen which then reforms into nitrates, and these get trapped in the ice. These papers have only the abstracts, but you can search for other literature from there. A search with "solar proton nitrates" finds all sorts of examples. There is still some debate about whether nitrates really are a reliable proxy for past solar activity.

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

FWIW, there's the bit about: "carefully raise them in a climate-controlled hanger" that reminds me of what some bright sparks did in my country (when trying to be helpful):

They collected lots of turtle eggs and incubated them to try to increase survival rates. However ALL the hatchlings turned out to be females.

Turtle gender is determined by the temperature of the eggs:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V5X-4002DP2-4&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F1995&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1403037906&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8218153421fb6ec52b5f99062d99f544

If there aren't that many eggs from that species, screwing up the gender ratio might be worse than just leaving them in "mama turtle" selected spots (and depths).

In this case I'm guessing that the climate controlled hanger will generate a more natural gender ratio (which probably includes at least one male per generation ;) ).

It's curious what sort of science makes it to the national news.

There are some odd aspects to the reported data. The effect seems to go away at higher doses. This is not unheard-of, and could be real, but it does raise a red flag. In one experiment, they saw an trend toward an effect on phototaxis in week 3, but not weeks one and 2, and the variability was so high it wasn't significant. So they repeated the experiment. On the second try, they saw an effect in all 3 weeks and this time it was significant. There are similar anomalies with respect to geotaxis. Repeating an experiment until you get the result you want is a bit shaky statistically (although it is often done) and will tend to exaggerate statistical significance. Reporting the two experiments separately is a bit odd, also; most people would tend to average multiple experiments together rather than reporting them separately. I would never publish an experiment that was done only twice and produced significant results in only a single trial.

So the result might be right, but there are enough oddities that I won't take it very seriously until it has been repeated. If the effect is real, but only occurs in a very narrow dose range as the data appears to show, it may not be particularly meaningful even if it is real--how often will shrimp in the wild be exposed to that narrow concentration range that appears to cause a problem?

Fossil fuel use isn't the most obvious thing that would be left behind. Bones aren't either.

Unless this past civilization never moved into the industrial age and never refined metals even if they were in a pre-industrial state, and never spread over a significant area of the Earth (e.g., they were confined to a single valley), the geochemical evidence of their presence would be flagrantly obvious to any geologist hundreds of millions of years later. And if they ever did anything with nuclear materials, it would be so obvious that the relevant instant in time would probably already be selected as a major boundary in Earth history, even if we didn't know what was responsible for it. It would *scream* "Someone has done this before" (in reference to nuclear power/weapons).

"There was mass vulcanism in Siberia that covered whatever was there originally under about 2 miles of magma round about the same time as the KT event - in fact some scientists believe that the KT event could have CAUSED this... so if our hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs had been living there ... no trace we could find may have survived."

You're mixed-up a bit. The flood basalts in Siberia are Permian in age and are suspected as one of the possible factors in the Permian/Triassic extinction. The flood basalts associated with the KT event are the Deccan Traps in India. Similar massive volcanism events and associated mass extinction, but different timing. It's a minor point, but burial isn't the issue

The real issue is: only if dinosaurs were intelligent enough to never have moved beyond stone tools could they escape detection. Industrialization is too messy.

Geologists have looked for any and all kinds of geochemical anomalies in Earth history, both stable isotopes and radioactive ones. Sure, they haven't specifically studied them in the hope of finding signs of civilization, but geochemical effects of industrial activity are the sorts of things that survive long after constructions have weathered away, and when geologists analyze this stuff they're typically surveying many different trace elements, so they would notice whether looking for it or not.

Do you know how archaeologists figure out when in a succession of recent sediments corresponds to the arrival of European industrialization in North America? They start seeing increasing amounts of lead in the sediment as people were mining and smelting the stuff. Likewise at much earlier times in Europe (for example). Similar trends exist for other metallic elements such as copper, mercury, etc.: onset of industialization is marked by metal contamination of coeval sediments. And at some time younger than that, you would see a spike in Caesium-137 and Lead-210 marking the 1950s increase in atomic testing -- a world-wide marker due to radioactive fallout. These are short-lived isotopes, but there are longer-lived ones that would be just as distinctive. And you wouldn't have to explode bombs. Just mining and processing radioactive materials would leave a signature.

Yes, we do see unusual geochemical signatures in Earth history such as the Ir spike at the K/T boundary. But how an industrial civilization might manage to refine and spread, say, iridium all over the planet, but not do the same thing for copper, nickel or lead, which are far more abundant and easier to extract, defies common sense. Civilizations probably vary, but they still deal with the physics and chemistry of the same universe as we do, and if they were on the same planet they have

The problem is that the tree rings accurately track temperatures until fairly recently, when some of the trees in some of the forests show "divergence," while others continue to correctly track temperature. So the trees do not merely diverge from the temperature record, but from one another.

Obviously, the fact that such divergence can occur limits confidence in the use of tree rings for climate reconstruction. On the other hand, it also shows that such divergence can be detected by comparing results from different forests. The fact that the historical tree ring data does not exhibit this kind of discrepancy between different sets of trees argues against divergence being a problem.

Here is a review that discusses the divergence problem and possible causes.

So, IQ in fact can measure something like social intelligence, the ability to manipulate people. Therefore, other things being equal, you would want to hire the person with higher IQ.

How much more arsenic will there be? Will the entire ocean die? Will just a few patches of the Gulf die? Or more likely will it not make the tiniest bit of difference?

I found these two abstracts that may help. Langmuir adsorption model is used to determine the effects.

I was trying to put some perspective on the BP oil spill for myself and found it's roughly an Exxon Valdez (E.V) disaster every week (based on approx 50,000 bbls per day), so it's 6 E.V's so far. Considering the amount of damage that was done there, local fisheries are now supported by hatcheries so the overall toxicity of the oil spill has pretty much destroyed the ecosystem. Twenty years later not much seems to have improved and Huffington Post reports not only the human health implications but the same-old same-old response we get from these companies as data collection efforts are simply stopped. Ignorance really is bliss and when it's not possible to do any science and politicians in the future can honestly say "The health implications cannot be determined".

That arsenic is a carcinogen that bio-accumulates in the environment means that even if this catastrophe was to stop right now the human health implications are something that will continue to unfold well into the next generation. Airborne pollutants like Hydrogen Sulfide, which took a week to dissipate from E.V just continue.

Bottom line: No-one knows (A metric ass load?). EPA says you can't harvest fish from seawater with a greater concentration of 0.0175 micrograms of Arsenic. Seawater is more capable of containing As than fresh water and there are many other factors (temperature, organic/inorganic As) that determine toxicity. Pressure from the depth of water is also a factor. I think what is being said here is that the Gulf of Mexico's days as a fishery are pretty much over and it's time to drill the shit out of that oil reserve and empty it as soon as possible.

Lets be realistic No-one is going to take the risk of being the "Oh but you made it worse" person that everyone points fingers at so NO-ONE will do ANYTHING. Right now you are seeing the people standing around the dying person bleeding wondering when someone is going to call the ambulance. I blame the greenies, if they'd have protested more none of this would have ever happened and we could have lived our apathetic little lives without an oil spill of this magnitude. As it so happens now we have to live our apathetic little live without the luxury of ignorance going, tsk tsk that oil spill - so bad tsk tsk.

References; Neff, Bioaccumulation in Marine Organisms: Effect of Contaminants from Oil Well Produced Water

I thought that was pretty interesting as well, doing before and after scans after body and paint mods might be very popular in areas where the police use radar instead of laser for speed measurement. It occured to me that graphite absorbs microwaves very well, and might be used as a paint pigment, and be toning down the highly reflective areas by changing the shape before painting a car might be almost invisible to radar..

Actually it's not that absurd- at least the human-animal hybrid part.

Most humans want to have special rights that other animals don't have. Despite what PETA and the rest think, we're going to be eating animals, experimenting on them, killing them.

So the problem is then: what happens when you have a human-animal hybrid?

At what percent do we regard the entity as human? And how do we calculate that percentage?

After all I see people talk about ripping organs out from a human-animal hybrid and then putting them into a human.

So the recipient becomes a human-animal hybrid too right? Does the recipient then lose rights to be considered human? Why not? If not, why doesn't the source human-animal hybrid have human rights too?

What if the "animal" human-animal hybrid turns out to be a bit more human than expected and just can't talk as well?

Or what if a bunch of hybrids turn out to be "better than human"? And use our example to justify killing or enslaving us?

Prohibiting the creation of such hybrids will reduce the scope of such problems (it won't get rid of them totally).

Don't get me wrong I'm not against progress. But we really should consider the long term consequences. Is society ready? Are our laws ready?

We're at the stage where "doing stuff just because it can be done" can have greater and more serious long-term consequences.

p.s. on the subject of transplants see:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VM8-416C9CR-3&_user=10&_coverDate=06%2F30%2F2000&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1358101317&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=43ba4a34044b04938f90894d2e7e2c25

Those are anecdotal and perhaps skewed, however I won't be surprised if some stem cells from the transplanted organs float around and start changing things a bit.

After all see:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=baby-to-brain

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fetal-cells-microchimerism

The blocks are as distinctive as all the non negative single digit numbers in the decimal system - actually, less so - there are 10 possible digits for the latter, whearas there are only 5 possible tetronimoes.

The Tetris blocks are based on the mathematical entities known as polyominos, specifically, the subgroup containing 5 orthogonally connected squares (not counting reflections and rotations).

It should be as patentable and copyright as PI - ie not at all, since it is strongly based on a branch of mathematics, specifically on the problem of how to tile such shapes, which has been the subject of a few papers, such as this and this

I'd be on to Google to claim they equally infringe YOUR game and Google them to drop their game too.

Not all plants react the same way .

There's a lot of work being done in this area right now- with good reason; there's tremendous potential, and the advance highlighted here is more of an incremental step in a rapidly maturing field than a breakthrough. As the parent notes, Dr. Fiona Wood pioneered a spray-on cell suspension over 15 years ago. She eventually founded a company (now called Avita Medical) which has commercialized this technology. In the last decade, it has been discovered that with minimal modification, an off-the-shelf inkjet printer can print living cells- this article is an example.

The story here from Wake Forest is apparently a successful test of using an inkjet to print directly on wounds using multiple cell types. The group reported these results at the Translational Regenerative Medicine Forum which took place the last few days. Who else happened to be at that forum? Avita Medical, where Dr. Wood still sits on the board.

There's lots of information available on the subsidence, via plate tectonics, of the Bay of Bengal, for exameple:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6X-4B4PWYT-1&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F02%2F2004&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1269324457&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=098986c85bd272474f1579b29771b39c

The islands are made of silt deposited by the river, and rise and fall depending or whether or not the river floods are depositing mud and building up islands faster than wave erosion and subsidence of the underlying plate are taking them down. The process is weather dependent, but weather is not the only significant force at work. The islands have come and gone before and will do so again.

before we begin what is you preferred alternative? just so we can compare it realistically to nuclear.

Ok, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Read this paper from two scientists from the nuclear industry who have specialisation on energy system analysis and made their study based on U.S Department of Energy standards for measuring energy use in heavy industry

Merely that it is the best option available. You have in no way established that any of the alternatives are safer,less polluting,cheaper or more practical.

Nuclear is comparable to coal with a different set of externalities. Wall Street doesn't like nuclear because its a risky investment, investors don't like that sort of risk, solar and wind are way ahead simply because the return on investment is much better than nuclear, i.e. Solar and wind satisfies the criteria that makes an investment "economically viable" nuclear power is only "economically viable" with substantial regulatory support.

The breakdown of U.S energy research and development reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources. The reality is that nuclear power has very high energetic inputs to process the ore, reprocessing and enrichment that comes from fossil feuls (2*1Gw coal plants for Paducah) which haven't been replaced. They rely on heavy carbon inputs for the concrete for the reactor containment, have energetic input subsequent to the end of the operational lifespan of the reactor, have higher energetic requirements for demolision, higher energetic input for logistic management (like transfer of the "waste" outputs).

In comparison solar, wind, wave and geo-thermal have initial carbon inputs(today) but offset carbon while they operate, do not continue to require energetic inputs at the end of their operational lifespan and do not require additional energetic inputs for demolition. Wind, in particular, scales very well.

We call these fuel.

You've read some of my criticisms of the Nuclear Industry may be surprised to find that I actually support the development of a reactor that addresses the issue of 70,000 tons of Pu-239 (and much more U-238) currently stored in reactor sites around America, simply because it's irresponsible for our generation to foist these issue onto later generations.

One of the core reasons I support the development of such a reactor because it is capable of utilising weapons grade plutonium as fuel creating an impetus for disarmament and, hopefully, slowly defusing the asymmetrical weapons threat.

Unfortunately, because there is no geologically sound Nuclear waste dump in operation it's totally inappropriate to discuss building a new reactor facility until a proper containment facility is available. As discussed Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.

We need something made of granite. The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore, so it has to be an engineering project of that scale, because the logistical problems of transferring the 70000 odd tons of Pu239 to the spent fuel containment facility are so involved that you want to get it right the first time and only do it once.

Even doing that will probably take 30 years to complete, but the

Hm. I think the two examples you gave mostly substantiate my understanding of the problem with the anti-nuclear mentality.

You say of them 'No proof is possible that it is safe' whereas your approach is 'No proof is necessary that it is safe'. It appears you both are afflicted with that mentality yourselves.

"...even after they were informed of the right answer, they still didn't change their opinions..."

Ok lets test the theory on you.

This is the crux. Despite revised knowledge, there's some kind of emotional resistance to nuclear.

This article describes the state of Nuclear waste around the world. This situation is unresolved and this technology will do nothing to resolve it. Did you know this or does this "revised knowledge" you now poses allow you to continue to justify your presumptions?

You may be tempted to refer to "Yucca Mountain" so please refer to studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology that revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less than 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain and that the DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste". Given the scientific and Governmental sources of information I've refered to do you categorised them as "emotional resistance to nuclear", because they look a lot like real reasons to me.

The emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe which was not undone by learning different. The fear remained regardless of knowledge change.

A "Licencee Event Report" (LER) is submitted for issues above a safety significance threshold. For example at Davis-Besse, the frequency of the replacement water filters was out of spec. It should have signaled that something is going wrong in the reactor. This is the type of event that should be signaled as a LER even if it seems insignificant. At the Davis Besse plant I believe that it led to criminal charges as management allowed the plant to operate outside of it's "Basis Design" which is a known operational characteristic of the plant. Filter replacement intervals had been defined and were known about and thus should have characterised the plant as "not operating safely". I'm not sure if the criminal charges were placed because management should have reported several LERs instead of inspectors finding a hole in the reactor head when it was shutdown.

Whilst this issue was resolved, it shouldn't have even occurred. There are questions regarding the operational safety of Vermont Yankee and Palo Verde so it's a current issue.

Nothing has changed this knowledge. So now that your knowledge has changed and you know Nuclear Industry near misses are not uncommon. These facts illustrate that "emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe" can be "actual caution based on a continued analysis of operational procedure" even if most people don't have the expertise to analyse them.

Do you poses that expertise? Has your "lack of concern" been maintained now that your knowledge has changed?

Emotions don't necessarily respond to logic/information. (Which you see in every online debate.)

A Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy,

Without the full text of the "Pigeons" article, I don't know what their experimental methods were, but it could be that they rewarded the pigeons for choosing drawings that the researchers themselves classified as "good" based on some consistent criteria that the pigeons were able to follow.

Silly as the article's title might sound, it turns out that pigeons are remarkably good at "reading" photographs and drawings. Something we might keep in mind when we dismiss these creatures as "dumb animals" (I'm referring here to pigeons, not scientists). Here's an example:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2J-494CHVR-C&_user=18704&_coverDate=01%2F30%2F2004&_rdoc=5&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%234920%232004%23999349998%23476623%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=4920&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=12&_acct=C000002018&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=18704&md5=fda3fc422365343df5668529b4fe708f

Answer: Empty bottles are sturdier, but full bottles have more mass. Both can exert enough force to crack a human skull.

Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B8CY1-4TVY5PW-1&_user=10&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F2009&_rdoc=8&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%2340101%232009%23999839996%23941076%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=40101&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=16&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=63643bee356bcb486ed2d2213a3895e2

Empirical evidence seems to indicate that marijuana improves my creative problem solving capabilities substantially. Then again, it can hinder the normal solution methods at times too. For example, I once struggled for about 10 minutes to compute 3 * 0.25 (definitely an exception, it usually does not impair numeracy so severely), but I approached the problem in ways I had never imagined before. A supposed 4-point temporary drop seems well worth the longterm effects of remodeling my perspective on, well, everything. I think I owe a lot of my intellectual development to that wonderful plant.

If society is open to allowing psychoactives with demonstrably negative long and short-term effects (i.e. ethanol), then why not allow psychoactives that make me creative, philosophical, non-belligerent, and in general the happiest man alive? One of my favourite inside jokes when high is to think that "Feeling this good should be a crime. Oh wait, it is" It's quite a depressing thought that it is in fact illegal to ingest (who inhales anyway? there are far more effective ways to go about it!) something to make oneself happy while not infringing on the rights of others. Unfortunately, by disobeying the law in this matter I am risking all credibility in my profession due to the strong social stigma against it. It's too bad that people fear that which they do not understand, that which they have only been told bad things about growing up and are thus nearly unable to form their own informed opinions on. However, as a greater portion of the population practices such peaceful civil disobedience, it drives the eventual rescindment of marijuana's illegality (at least one can hope).

I have been surprised to learn how prevalent this form of civil disobedience is. Perhaps a lot of people conceal their use out of fear (it's illegal, and socially frowned upon) as I do. Perhaps there are more benevolent marijuana missionaries out there spreading the word of peace and happiness.

These papers studying cannabis as a risk factor for steatosis and hepatitis C (a finding which is contradicted by another study that I can't find at the moment) indicate that 24-30% of patients use it daily (in France at least, but I've seen similar numbers for other locales).

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WFX-4R7J81G-5&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F29%2F2008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1212900528&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=fb8c342ecca065efc61e77e527067e0f

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/110493927/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

If that proportion ever exceeds 50% or so, I see no alternative for governments but to concede to the will of the people and legislate accordingly.

If you dug a little deeper you'd find that W. Edelstein is one of the pioneers of magnetic resonance imaging (my own field). "Physics" is an awfully big field. I couldn't find out what his original specialization was, but it's been a LONG time since he did any space-related work. He is certainly an outsider to the field of manned space travel.

I've never heard of his co-author, Arthur Edelstein. It looks like he's a programmer at UCSF, formerly UC Berkeley. William's son? Grandson? Google scholar only shows up a couple of hits. W and A Edelstein have a paper on MR in JMRI (looks like from W's lab, he's senior author, A buried in the middle). The two of them have been covering a lot of ground - they've also got an arxiv preprint on electronic voting machines. That's kind of weird too - it doesn't have much to do with physics and every one of the references are web pages, including Wikipedia.

  His abstract seems a bit strange - I'd have thought you'd have to do something a little more in depth to get accepted to an APS meeting. I've seen much the same calculation in Slashdot posts over the years. Maybe those posters should have submitted something. It's also possible there's a lot more content in the actual presentation.

Now, what was it you were saying about presumptions?

First off, wind power is a great supplement, not a replacement. It suffers from too much variability to be a reliable power source, and therefore replace fossil fuels.

True but geothermal is a reliable and steady energy source. It's also available in many places. Iceland, in the Arctic, gets a lot of energy from geothermal sources. California gets 4.5% of it's energy from geothermal sources. In Hawaii the Big Island gets 20% of it's energy from the Puna Geothermal Venture which supplies geothermal energy. Heck even the Philippines harvests geothermal energy. Mexico has 853 MW of installed geothermal energy.

That energy does not depend of sunlight or the wind. It is a steady source of energy. New York state has the webpage Geothermal Heat Pumps with contacts that can install both commercial and residential systems.

at least with nuclear power, the pollution is contained.

No it's not. Mining is not contained. Neither are leaks, spills, and other releases. Such as the tritium spills at Exelon Nuclear-owned plants in IL.

As for your road tax solution, who cares if we pay it with income taxes or fuel taxes?

I do as do many others. Only those who use the roads should have to pay for them. If a person does not directly pay for something they have no idea how much it costs for one Now if you have to pay say 10 cents a mile, in addition to gas costs, unless you're wealthy you will pay attention. And I say that as someone who loves driving and will not give up my car unless I have to.

Everyone uses and benefits from the roads.

And they will pay for it, but not with income taxes. You may walk or ride a bike everywhere but as long as you buy items you will still pay for the roads. Sellers raise their prices to cover their expenses, they are in business to make money afterall. Heck even when you order a physical object online, you're paying. Say you order a printed book from Amazon you pay shipping and the shipper pays for the roads.

Falcon

found here
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4Y4XCTH-3&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F15%2F2010&_rdoc=18&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%235801%232010%23997099998%231609118%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=5801&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=26&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ae24ceb289eae1dcc9bc6870f3192dc2
And this is the abstract A slice of the Haverö meteorite which belongs to the ureilite class known to contain graphite and diamond was cut and then polished as a thin section using a diamond paste. We identified two carbonaceous areas which were standing out by more than 10 m in relief over the surface of the silicate matrix suggesting that the carbonaceous phases were not easily polishable by a diamond paste and would therefore imply larger polishing hardness. These areas were investigated by reflected light microscopy, high-resolution Field Emission SEM (FESEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and were subsequently extracted for in situ synchrotron microbeam X-ray fluorescence (XRF), imaging and X-ray diffraction (XRD). We report here the natural occurrences of one new ultrahard rhombohedral carbon polymorph of the R3m space group which structure is very close to diamond but with a partial occupancy of some of the carbon sites. We also report the natural occurrence of the theoretically predicted 21R diamond polytype with lattice parameters very close to what has been modelized. These findings are of great interests for better understanding the world of carbon polymorphs and diamond polytypes giving new natural materials to investigate. These natural samples demonstrate that the carbon system is even more complex than what is currently thought based on ab initio static lattice calculations and high-pressure experiments since this new ultrahard polymorph has never been predicted nor synthesized.

No one has ever even contemplated replacing a Coal-fired plant with a renewable source of energy because renewable in no way, shape, or form have the dependability to be counted on to produce 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 365 days a year Electricity. I'm not making this stuff up, it's simply a fact of life right now.

One, when did I say anything about closing down all coal-fired, Natural Gas-fired, or nuclear power plants right now? Two, it is a fact of life geothermal can provide a baseload of energy now, today. It is happening as I type this in Iceland, Hawaii, and in the Philippines. California gets 5% of it's baseload from geothermal [pdf] energy.

You can't try and solve every problem at once because all you'll end up doing in NOTHING AT ALL. We can solve a big chunk of our pollution problem right now by switching to Nuclear. We'll tackle the well understood problems with Nuclear when we get to that bridge.

Three, when have I said anything about the 1 big solution, other than discounting it? I haven't, I have repeatedly stated I believe that each place should use the source of energy that is available locally. Solar where it's available, wind where it is, tidal where it is and so on. And as I state above geothermal can be used as a baseload. On the other hand Nuclear power is part of the problem. It is dirty from cradle to grave. Mining it is dirty, processing it is dirty, reprocessing it is dirty, and storing it is dirty. Plus no market or business will pay for it without government subsidies. Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies.

"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

Falcon

Yes, we saw your CATO institute link before, and yet I'm still not impressed with it.

Everything is hooked on subsidies by their definition. We enjoy some of the lowest food prices in the World thanks to massive corn subsidies. No one is looking to remove them because everyone likes it that way. So let's just leave the "subsidies are bad" arguments out of it right now.

As for geothermal, you can't show me a single example of a geothermal plant that isn't located near or directly over a natural source of geothermal heat.

If you'd bothered to try and understand what I was saying (rather than doing your best to lump me in with all renewable bashers) you would have understood that when I said it needed continued research. My point was that it needed continued research before it could be used everywhere.

And, again, you keep using the fact of supposed subsidies as a catch-all excuse as too why Nuclear is bad. If you leave that out, I'm afraid your argument doesn't have much else.

No one has ever even contemplated replacing a Coal-fired plant with a renewable source of energy because renewable in no way, shape, or form have the dependability to be counted on to produce 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 365 days a year Electricity. I'm not making this stuff up, it's simply a fact of life right now.

One, when did I say anything about closing down all coal-fired, Natural Gas-fired, or nuclear power plants right now? Two, it is a fact of life geothermal can provide a baseload of energy now, today. It is happening as I type this in Iceland, Hawaii, and in the Philippines. California gets 5% of it's baseload from geothermal [pdf] energy.

You can't try and solve every problem at once because all you'll end up doing in NOTHING AT ALL. We can solve a big chunk of our pollution problem right now by switching to Nuclear. We'll tackle the well understood problems with Nuclear when we get to that bridge.

Three, when have I said anything about the 1 big solution, other than discounting it? I haven't, I have repeatedly stated I believe that each place should use the source of energy that is available locally. Solar where it's available, wind where it is, tidal where it is and so on. And as I state above geothermal can be used as a baseload. On the other hand Nuclear power is part of the problem. It is dirty from cradle to grave. Mining it is dirty, processing it is dirty, reprocessing it is dirty, and storing it is dirty. Plus no market or business will pay for it without government subsidies. Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies.

"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

Falcon