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This article explains some of the theories related to why food tastes different in microgravity.

I appreciate your awe, however disingenuous it may be. My methodologies may be controversial here, but they are based on some interesting notions:
* conservatives don't trust science any more.
* belief trumps facts

If you are looking for scientific rigor, perhaps you should check your own posts. I can't seem to find anything remotely informative there, Mr. Peanut Gallery.

Sorry, but you're clearly wrong on all three points.

He's only wrong right this second. Don't forget that the government changed the rules before. They'll change them again when it suits them.

The typical example is Nazi Germany, whose persecution of Jews was perhaps hundreds of times more effective than it'd have been for the sole reason Germany had extensive, very precise information on who was a Jew and where, exactly, all of them lived.

Closer to home, at least for most slashdotters, was the WWII interment of americans of japanese descent - where the US Census Bureau handed over their names and addresses to the US Secret Service who then rounded them up.

What's more, such misuse of census data is (and was even then) forbidden, except that congress passed the war-powers act removiing those protections. Which goes to show that it does not matter what someone promises to do (or not do) with your data, if they have it, sooner or later they are going find a way to use it in ways that are not in your best interest.

And in case anyone feels the need to trivialize the internment of these people as a temporary precaution - it was NOT temporary. While they were gone, many of them had their property (land and other assests) confiscated or otherwise stolen so that when they were finally released, many were impoverished. We didn't send them to the gas chambers, but we were only marginally less cruel than the people we were fighting.

Having children diagnosed with Autism, and fairly far out on the spectrum, I wouldn't call it a dis-ability, they're "differently-abled."

If all you care about is being able to sit in a room with 17 other kids their age, shut up and do what they're told - yeah, that's a problem, well into the disability range. Personally, I don't think that the ability to sit like a vegetable and follow basic instructions is the only thing of value that a person can offer to society.

In my family, at least, this finding goes a long way toward explaining at least some of our "abnormal" behaviors:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=mind-wandering-is-linked-to-your-wo-12-03-17

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geothermal-drilling-earthquakes

Third paragraph.

How ever could the parent post rate a 4?

We have a healthy run of innovation ahead of us for solar. If the historical rates continue (as they have for the last 30 years) solar will become the power source of choice not because of subsidies or green concerns. It will simply be the cheapest, most profitable option, by far -- cheaper than oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear. Add portable, scalable from the individual up to entire regions, reliable, and clean, and you have an easy choice.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/

It really does pay to do your research.

Yep soil bacteria can even improve mood:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18082129/ns/health-livescience/t/soil-bacteria-can-boost-immune-system/

And increase learning ability... in mice ;) http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=soil-bacteria-might-increase-learni-10-05-24

Many like the smell after rain which partly results from bacteria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosmin

That is the common sense view that doesn't work when you actually look at it. Kind of like when you realize the Moon is orbiting the Earth means it is constantly falling, but missing the Earth. But, the Moon is gradually drifting away. Unless you look at all the interacting elements, it sounds weird to hear the Moon is falling "down" yet is drifting "up"/away at the same time.

The short of it is this. Snow stays and builds up all winter, ideally. Spring and into Summer it melts releasing a whole season's worth of extra water beyond just rain. No snow, the rain that should be snow hits the ground. It flows off into the streams, rivers, etc. and vanishes near immediately. Water is a use it or lose it resource if you rely on rivers/rain. Snow is nature's little cheat.

This explains it better: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-snow-drought-serious-implications

If you want to cut latency, communicate through the Earth with neutrinos. If we could just get the bit rate up some (from the current 0.1 bps), you could communicate to anywhere on Earth with a one way time of 40 milliseconds.

Go get a masters in CS, then apply to IBM: pretty soon now they are going to need people who have psych & CS to work with the human & animal simulations. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=graphic-science-ibm-simulates-4-percent-human-brain-all-of-cat-brain

And if that doesn't interest you, your degree is most valuable in the year or so after you've gained it, until you have experience of your chosen field. If you don't want to study more, perhaps something where you can leverage the degree to gain operational IT experience - for instance something in user interface design. There are consultancies which specialise in this. Look for opportunities which leverage your degree.

Ethics sidenote: When you have simulated a brain and you killall on the processes, have you just done a bad thing? At what point is the cat simulation conscious? And should we be concerned about live animal experimentation? Now there's still a lot we have to learn about the ways that brains work - just look at the recently proposed microtubule idea for memory (can't find the original reference where I read about it, but Google shows a few results), but I think we are on the cusp of the where questions like this matter. Maybe models need aging built in, so that the cat dies a simulated death. And then there's the issue of whether keeping a conciousness in isolation is cruel. Should the simulation have simulated toys? Companions? Food?

Planting, growing, harvesting, processing and delivering food is a huge energy user. We use about 10 calories of fossil fuels for every 1 calorie of food produced in the US.

Renewables do not scale big enough or fast enough

They don't? Many disagree. Here's A Solar Grand Plan, published in Scientific American, which claims that by 2050 we can get most of our energy from solar. There are many other similar ideas.

If we had to, we most certainly could go 100% green! If we ran out of fossil fuels and uranium next year, we would very quickly have alternatives in place. We wouldn't go back to 17th century technology. We only use coal because it's cheap and easy, not because we have no choice.

oh. You only go to Doctors with a PhD in medicine? You forgetting the Mainstream Medical communities reaction to the Cure for Rabies? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-cure-for-rabies

Long before that, they'll come from Afghanistan, in all likelihood:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=afghanistan-holds-enormous-bounty-of-rare-earths

(which may explain a few things...)

Nuclear power plants tend to be much larger so they have a lot more waste heat to dump. In addition, some forms of fossil fuel plants dump their waste heat directly into the air without using water cooling. This works because the combustion temperature inside a fossil-fuel power plant is much higher than the fuel plate temperatures in a water-cooled nuclear power plant so they can still be efficient overall even with using the atmosphere as a heat sink.

One interesting article I read said that power generation accounts for about half the water usage in the USA:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-saving-energy-means-conserving-water

... and with a working link.. here

Whereas solar...just doesn't seem to be getting results, for all that is spent on it....

Check the facts, you'll find there has been amazing progress! Solar has gone from a sci-fi pipe dream 30 years ago to (arguably) cheaper than Nuclear today. It's true that investment in solar hasn't paid off yet, but if that cost-reduction curve can hold out a little longer, it will pay off, immensely.

Well then do not eat shrimp or fish or clams or mussels that came from the gulf.

The gulf has seen bad spills before (Ixtoc I). Oil seeps into gulf naturally. The Gulf of Mexico does get oil in it all the time and has been for 1000s of years. It might be one of the best places to have a spill. Which really ticks the environmental people off. Don't get me wrong, spills are bad and should be avoided. They going to happen at some point for some reason. Steps should always be taken to minimize them.

I recall from memory, and I do not have an online account with them, but on the print edition of Scientific American a few years back there was a report of an experiment on the space shuttle, in which they tried to estimate the natural seepage of hydrocarbons in the gulf of mexico by photo analisys of day views, since the oil slicks had a different reflectivity. The photos were quite amazing, it was really pervasive.

Ironically, coal-burning power plants actually emit more radiation than nuclear plants.

If these fear mongers really want to protest against nuclear waste they should be picketing coal plants.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just clarifying my point, in case there's any misunderstanding.

Also, just because knowing more memories increases the ability to remember does not imply that the brain never actively forgets something it finds unnecessary.

It means it's unnecessary for the brain to delete memories, though. It's unlikely the brain would make an effort to delete something if there's no practical limit to the number of things you can keep in your memory.

I don't think you have any science to back this up, just your gut feeling. If you've got sources, I'd be interested.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity

Project Natal was developed at Microsoft Research Cambridg: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microsoft-project-natal

Microsoft used an Israeli company to develop the actual product hardware. This may be the reason why someone could think that MS just "bought" the entire product. Or it could be an opportunity for ./ MS haters to create a myth that MS cannot innovate.

But this was a MSR project all along.

Even if they actually did delete it from all their servers and backups, some of it could still have been harvested by who knows how many site grabbers and bots. And you can't delete that.

Some of these "bots" would probably know a lot more about you than Facebook already. I'm amazed about the amount of privacy concerns on Slashdot about a site you voluntarily choose to upload content to share, compared to the massiv non-opt-in cross-site aggregation (including here on this site, check the HTML) of data about you Google is amassing. You think you are clever running no-script including on Slashdot? Think again, that is just one of several ways to fingerprint you.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-googles-new-privacy-p

the ship that carried two of each of the millions of known species that currently exists

Oh, that one's easy! Noah only took two of each animal that existed at the time, which wasn't many. There was only, like, one type of dog. After he landed, speciation occurred, and now there's all sorts of different dogs!

What do you mean a breed is not a species? Now you're just being difficult on purpose.

Since Europe has banned them, it's definitely worthy of study, at least. Whether that can ever be done honestly in the US is another question. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=europe-bans-x-ray-body-scanners

On what planet is pig blood harmful to a river?

Fertilizer runoff is a major problem in rivers.

Pig blood is essentially fertilizer.

Is a possible rise in sea level of greater concern than a possible die-off[sic] of a huge swath of sea life? Not sure, thus my question.

A die-off of marine life could lead to more severe long-term consequences if the oxygen balance of the ocean is sufficiently disrupted. There has been research and speculation on oceanic anoxic events suggesting that anaerobic bacteria, specifically sulphate reducers that normally live in sea-floor sediments, could gradually migrate towards the surface as environmental conditions became more hospitable for them (i.e. less oxygen in the water). If you're really interested, you'd find some interesting reading by Googling "Permian Triassic". Here's a couple of quick teasers to get you started.

I think you underestimate hogs. Some may not be as easy to take down quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar#Physical_characteristics

While I'm sure normal hunters would prefer to show-off their skill with a one bullet kill, if you screw up and you end up having to drop a big one charging at you before it hits you, I think you'd prefer the extra firepower.

But if you fill it with so much lead it might not be safe to eat: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=wild-game-deer-venison-condors-meat-lead-ammunition-ban :)

(the group most discriminated against of all) an athiest.

There's a reason for that:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-atheists-we-distrust

Interesting point from the article, they imply that in a heavily policed state atheists are less discriminated against. Seems that people just need to feel that someone is watching them (and, by implication, the other guy), if everyone believes in God, that need is satisfied to some degree.

Dr. Emanuel's thinking seems right on this; there's evidence that "genetics only account for approximately 20 to 30 percent of an individual's chance of surviving to age 85." (see Scientific American) Maybe rather than provide cures, personalized medicine could be used to give people a more accurate estimate of how long they're going to live, based off various lifestyle decisions. Nothing motivates like a deadline.

Yes, I'm sure. That Mangano-Sherman "Study" has been roundly criticized as using extremely flawed methods and cherry picking data to come to a pre-determined conclusion.

Don't believe me? Try Scientific American.

Mutated vegetables? Please, that kind of thing has been going on forever. You'll find wierd looking produce in any garden or field of appreciable size. If you can show that the rates of mutation are much higher, statistically, than *normal*, that's one thing, but having a smart-ass blog with a few mutated fruits and veggies doesn't prove anything.

You could almost certainly even find babies from Japan with Birth Defects that have been born since Fukushima, but again, humans have been being born with Birth Defects for as long as their have been humans. That doesn't mean Fukushima caused those defects.

When the person representing the corporation in charge says something like this:

"We know the heat is there," said Susan Petty, president of AltaRock.
"The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic."

And the expert seismologist says something like this:

We've been monitoring [The Geysers] since 1975.
All the earthquakes we see there are [human] induced.
When they move production into a new area, earthquakes start there, and when they stop production, the earthquakes stop.

Well... You kinda have a reason to fear.

Where it becomes bad is if they harass or in any way mistreat people who aren't threatening violence.

Where it becomes bad is that they harass or in any way mistreat people who aren't threatening violence.

FTFY

Is there any evidence that they're doing that?

It's called "Flying"
I envy you for not having to do so at all in the past decade, I truly wish I could say the same.
Since you haven't been there to see first hand, nor seen the news and stories of what's going on, here is the evidence you requested:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=europe-bans-x-ray-body-scanners

http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/tsa-pat-down-search-abuse

http://tsaabuse.blogspot.com/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027775/-TSA-Arrests-Me-for-Using-the-Fourth-Amendment-as-a-Weapon-(Tales-from-the-Edge-of-a-Revolution-2)

http://www.prisonplanet.com/tsa-groping-out-of-control.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/Image/tricorder.jpg

Or my country (the US in case there's anyone that hasn't figured that out yet) can let Europe give it a try and see how that plays out. If they don't fail hard (and frankly, they have trouble meeting Kyoto Treaty standards), then the US can try it.

Parts of your country, the parts where most of the people live, aren't going to do so well with a 100 year "wait and see" approach:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-governments-south-florida-above-tide

Of course we're going to have an impact on our environment. The difference between us and the first cyanobacteria (that caused massive climatic upheaval when the oxygen levels on earth reached a tipping point where other first generation single celled entities died off en masse) is that we have the ability to reason, if we use it, and chose options that will not be as destructive to the ecosystem that we are a part of, and upon which we rely for our lives.

What we have in common with the cyanobacteria, however, is that we don't understand the consequences of the various choices we could make. The ability to reason should not be confused with sufficiently good understanding to predict those consequences. The best we can say is probably that if we "do less", in the sense of creating less delta relative to the world as it would be without us, conditions will probably be more like they've been in the past. Unfortunately, that's an exceedingly weak and almost useless statement, as "the past" includes an extremely wide range of conditions including many that would make our current existence completely impossible.

The questions before us in this area are whether we should attempt to "do less" in an attempt to avoid irreversibly bad outcomes (certainly no guarantee of a happy outcome anyway), and, if not, whether we should apply our profoundly imperfect understanding of our impact in one way or another to attempt to control our environment in unprecedented ways. The only thing I'm sure of is that anyone who pretends to have the "correct" answers to these questions is either intellectually dishonest or a self-serving piece of shit. The rest of this "debate" is a waste of time, money, and electrons. Give it up already. Everything goes to hell a billion years from now anyway.

Of course we're going to have an impact on our environment. The difference between us and the first cyanobacteria (that caused massive climatic upheaval when the oxygen levels on earth reached a tipping point where other first generation single celled entities died off en masse) is that we have the ability to reason, if we use it, and chose options that will not be as destructive to the ecosystem that we are a part of, and upon which we rely for our lives.

Two days ago there were several articles stating that leap second might be abolished: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=leap-seconds-may-disappear-12-01-02 "This month the International Telecommunication Union will consider a proposal to abolish leap seconds."

Familiar with both, don't put faith in either. One claims it has a better way of describing what is happening than the other, they're both ideologies, but not facts.

Nice false dichotomy there, though. You're giving me two options of your own choice (both of which support your position), and asserting that either I must believe in one wrong one or another. My point is that I don't.

I believe the government are idiots, that the system is corrupt, and most things which claim to describe how it all works is, by definition, woefully incomplete and likely to be filled with its own biases about how it all works. In some cases, those can be very dangerous as people blindly believe their system is infallible. You know, beliefs like the notion that everyone is acting with full and complete information, that people aren't gaming the system, that an unregulated economy will end up with results any different than melamine in baby formula.

If my choice comes down to this:

These are the Free Banking and anarcho-capitalist movements. Although they have competing views of monetary policy, they share a fundamental view of most economic philosophy.

then my answer is "neither". As a matter of fact, I'll go one step further and say that if the choice is free banking or anarcho capitalism, well, that's what got us into the recent financial mess, and that neither works. I think the whole thing is flawed.

And, really, all you're saying is that by disagreeing with Ron Paul I'm disagreeing with the principles of Libertarian economics ... which I've already quite explicitly said. I think in general economists know far less than they're willing to admit. They just think they've wrapped it up in some grand unifying theory that appeals to them, and then they wrap themselves up in it like it's religion. And then it's all dogma from there.

Hell, Alan Greenspan used to suggest that people should borrow all of the equity they have in their home, because it was basically free money. That alone forces me to conclude he was an advocate of something which didn't work. Hell, he eventually even admitted that "something" was wrong about his view of economics, he's just not sure of what.

I'm simply no longer willing to believe the people who claim to know how to run the economy ... they're clearly unqualified. And, for the record, I don't claim to have a better solution ... but I can tell the ones that are failing horribly.

The media keeps mixing and confusing fracking with saltwater disposal wells. (remember how much they confuse hackers and crackers)

Fracking is a one time process for increasing porosity of a formation immediately around the well at the time of completion.

A saltwater disposal well is normally a well(oil or gas) that has played out and is used to return unwanted saltwater back where it came from.

Fracking only affects an area within a few hundred feet of the well.

Sure, that all depends on how you define it.

"If fracking is defined as a single fracture of deep shale, that action might be benign. When multiple “fracks” are done in multiple, adjacent wells, however, the risk for contaminating drinking water may rise. If fracking is defined as the entire industrial operation, including drilling and the storage of wastewater, contamination has already been found."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-truth-about-fracking

ie giving cosmonauts pencils instead of billion dollar space pens

Oh dear lord, not this again. Please become less fucking stupid.

... and to further that ...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-glossed-over-cancer-concerns

While the research on medical X-rays could fill many bookcases, the studies that have been done on the airport X-ray scanners, known as backscatters, fill a file no more than a few inches thick. None of the main studies cited by the TSA has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the gold standard for scientific research.

... expect to die around 40-50, since that's the point at which you are, from a "survival of the species" point of view, dead weight.

Not necessarily.

There have been no space station fatalities at all so far, let alone any that were the result of pencil shavings. In fact the only (human) fatalities "in space" were the crew of Soyuz 11.

Yeah. That last little bit in the second quote does not match what NASA says. That the US has been using "space pens" since 1967 and that the Russians have been using them since 1969, pre Salyut, Mir and International space stations.
http://history.nasa.gov/spacepen.html

That said the hazards of broken pencil tips, graphite dust and wood shavings was a real concern with respect to electrical shorts, fires and physical hazards (ex: broken tip vs. eyes).

"Originally, NASA astronauts, like the Soviet cosmonauts, used pencils, according to NASA historians ... Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen

"...and even cylcon symbols by Australia's Aborigines which can be up to 20,000 years old."
Holy crap ... I had no idea BSG was a documentary!

There is some evidence that there was a "nuclear" war in India thousands of years ago. See http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_07.htm I'm not sure what to make of it but it is interesting.

Here is the only ancient nuclear reactor.

Heirloom stuff has lost much of its nutritional value because it's too imbred. As for what our bodies are optimized for, it's certainly nothing you can find on a farm or in a grocery store. 10,000 years of agriculture have allowed us to artificially select desirable traits in plants, which does the same thing as genetic engineering. Here is an article trying to reverse engineer the genetic modifications that took the tomato from a 1 g fruit to a 1000 g fruit.

Gene transfer happens in nature anyway, much like the experiments done by the LHC occur in the upper atmosphere routinely. That is why you cannot find the plant we modified into the tomato (or any crop), the genes from the artificial version we've cultivated have contaminated the natural version we started with, until neither resemble what a pre-agricultural human would have eaten.

So what does "about to" mean in astronomical terms? Tomorrow? Next year? In a few million years?

Roughly two years: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=black-hole-gas-blob

Yes, program your genes to build cages around cells. What could go wrong with that?

Well, except for the fact that the majority of cells in the human body aren't, technically, human at all. There are more bacterial cells than human ones. So, snarky comments aside, that would be extremely dangerous. You might be able to select only dangerous cells, but I very much doubt it. Not genetically, anyways. Anti-bacterial agents need to be targeted specifically, or you can do more harm than good.

yeah accidents to measurably shorten life spans, but in day-to-day runnings there is significantly more radiation around coal-fired plants than by nuclear plants.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

The simple rebuttal is why hasn't the "clathrate gun" gone off some time in the past 650,000 years?

You know, my investment institution makes the point of "Past performance is not an indication of future performance" quite often, so I'm not quite willing to consider the question of "Why hasn't it gone off?" as a rebuttal... even though it does have a value as a question.

You see... I willing to bet the last 650,000 years didn't see an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico either. Neither did they see a so high concentration of power in the hands of pure economically (read: "greed") driven and short term focused (read: "Next bonuses round") entities.