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Not that I agree with LA county on this one, but I think you are assuming that human slavery has been eradicated. It has not. Not even in the U.S.

This article on scientific american says 45% of Americans believe in young earth creationism.

Space could be finite if it has a convex curvature or an unusual topology (that is, interconnectedness). A spherical, doughnut-shaped or pretzel-shaped universe would have a limited volume and no edges. The cosmic microwave background radiation allows sensitive tests of such scenarios [see "Is Space Finite?" by Jean-Pierre Luminet, Glenn D. Starkman and Jeffrey R. Weeks; Scientific American, April 1999]. So far, however, the evidence is against them. Infinite models fit the data, and strong limits have been placed on the alternatives.

Space could be finite if it has a convex curvature or an unusual topology (that is, interconnectedness). A spherical, doughnut-shaped or pretzel-shaped universe would have a limited volume and no edges. The cosmic microwave background radiation allows sensitive tests of such scenarios [see "Is Space Finite?" by Jean-Pierre Luminet, Glenn D. Starkman and Jeffrey R. Weeks; Scientific American, April 1999]. So far, however, the evidence is against them. Infinite models fit the data, and strong limits have been placed on the alternatives.

The story at Scientific American can be reached from this link.

This is a working link to the article.

JP

Well, I won't say for sure, but I think there is a strong chance that the same man largely responsible for the last ten years could play a role in the evolution over the next ten years as well...

The Semantic Web.

They found 'Gladiator' only a few decades ago.

Article Link Here

It says that Yet pound for pound, the sturdiest spider silks are stronger than steel and stretchier than nylon.

I heard that while back the Army made a vest out of Spider Silk rather than Kevlar and it was able to stop even small rifle bullets O_o.

This could be very revolutionary. I wonder how it compares to silk?

Monkeys stick wires in your brain and control YOU

If the DOE is sinking money into funding this project then do they own the subsequent life form? Does J. Craig Venter get to patent its genes and control who does and does not use it. They say that they are planning to hobble it so that it can't leave the lav without their assistance.

I realize that this may sound farfetched (this is a single-celled lifeform). But, what legal precident does this establish with regards to ownership. If they argue "we made it we own it," what does that mean for clones?

Ownership of genes is already a big issue (they can patent you see here)

So that having been said I'm glad to hear J Craig mention "eithics" but I'm still not sutre that I trust him, the DOE or this project.

Former demonstrations at Antioch

Pluaralism and the Last Century; implications on H.4

Couple with some technology like this we could have some seriously effective soldiers. Not that we don't already...

Perhaps you ought to turn off your AM talk radio and read this article written by someone who actually knows something about the topic.

If you take the article as a whole, there are some interesting points made. But beyond that recognition, what is the overall affect? I have to say that the evidence points to nothing. I mean, what are we trying for here? A null hypothesis.

Take a look at these links for a more "balanced" viewpoint on the issue.

• Scientific American
• The Enterprise Mission
• techsoup

Interesting.

I guess the gas method took quite a few years to do, but progress was fairly consistent. They got light town to airplane speed, race car speed, bicycle speed, and then stopped it altogether.

Here's a link to the Bottomquark writeup on it, and here's the article itself.

Actually this has already been implemented. This article at Scentific American Magazine from the November 2001 issue describes in detail where the technology is and how it is currently being used. P.S. I know that it is an IP address, but that is what Scientific american sends you to. If you want goto Scientific American's homepage and search for electronic paper. The first result is the article linked to above.

How you got +5 Insightful is beyond me, at least in the context of the original discussion. What a waste of mod points. You ought to be slapped down to -1 Offtopic.

Apparently very few people chose to read any of the linked articles, evidenced by Chicken Little here crying about the more pressing problems of the modern age. I'll agree with you that couples attempting to have a child by cloning is "silly", but the need to reproduce is a biological imperative hard-wired into our brains. As a species, our reproductive priorities probably fall in the loose order of:

immaculate(God)
natural(you and me baby)
invitro(you, me OR someone else, and a test tube)
cloning(me, possibly you or someone else - but not neccesarily, and a test tube)
adoption(maybe you, maybe me, maybe neither of us)

Folks, the article is about therapeutic cloning, not reproductive cloning. You can get off your soapboxes and stop warning us about the End of Man. Read the Scientific American article before you start clucking, OK?

In a nutshell, for those of you who are too mired in ignorance/sensationalism:

At our current stage of tech, a mature female egg can be stripped of it's nucleus, and a donor cell (skin in this case) is implanted itno the egg. This "embryo/zygote" is then encouraged to divide. Alternatively, they managed to get a mature female egg to divide without the introductionof any foreign material at all. (Guys, we are no longer needed ;)

The point behind all this was not to implant these embryos into a uterus and bring to term. The point is to supply stem cells, for therapy of autoimmune diseases and spinal injuries.
My spine cells, used to create more of my spine cells, to be re-introduced into my damaged spine, to grow an undamaged spine.

I don't see an army of cloned soldiers or designer babies here. Now move along.

If I'm not mistaken, the study shows that the Granmaster "remembers" while the newbie "analyzes". As the newbie evolves as a chess player, he will gradually start remebering more than he analyses. Or were you refering to a different study than this one?

Another advantage of LCDs though is their (potential) ability to use a digital, rather than analog, interface to the graphics card.

I believe that I heard about this technology in SciAm a few years ago. I'm really looking forward to smaller CRT's. LCD displays have come along way, but I personally still wouldn't buy one, and I generally recommend against them to people buying computers. To my mind, it's still hard to beat my ViewSonic PF790 flat CRT for size and clarity - I just wish the damn thing didn't weigh 60 lbs, and didn't take up most of my desk!

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Less funny than you think. Appropriately one of the first Beowulf clusters was called the Stone Soupercomputer. Not that they built it out of stone; it was named after the parable of the Stone Soup.

There's an article about it in this month's Scientific American.

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Scientific American

In August 1999, Scientific American covered a similar technology being developed at MIT, but in this case, the reconfigurable computation was targeted at a handheld device dubbed the "Handy 21" which could act as a cell phone or PDA or FM radio by changing its circuitry.

there has been no innovation in any field of science or technology.

This is a day late and a dollar short, but better than nothing.

To wit, it is easy for a human to use a virus to kill all the mice in a lab if the human is not susceptible to the virus. On the other hand, we have seen how difficult it is for a human to use a virus to kill other humans due to similar susceptibilities. Even something as simple as nerve gas requires special gear.

The one most famous case in which Europeans killed the natives of North America with smallpox was successful because the Europeans had a much lower susceptibility to smallpox. This is not the case for sarin, anthrax, or possibly genetically engineered smallpox. To handle such items, a proper protective infrastructure must exist which can increases the visibility of the to be warrior.

I feel much more threatened by super viruses created by the abuse of antibiotics. These agents exist. They already cause suffering. They move easily through the exisiting food chain to unsuspecting victim.

Although it may be illegal by the ADA, I know of people who were not hired because of health info, and I know another who was denied a mortgage because of a heart ailment.

May this help others in like case.

Although it may be illegal by the ADA, I know of people who were not hired because of health info, and I know another who was denied a mortgage because of a heart ailment.

May this help others in like case.

Time to reprise my post from a previous space life article: silicon won't work as a basis for organic life.

The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, perhaps carbon/ammonia (or other simple solvent) in a colder environment, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon folk).

Science fantasy authors love to write stories about "silicon-based life", but anyone with sufficient training in biochemistry can tell you silicon won't work as a basis for organic life.

And if you're going to consider even more exotic ideas ("photonic life" a la Star Trek, or neutronium life), you might as well be discussing ghosts and gremlins. They're just as plausible.

The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon/water life).

Assuming that the identifying factor in the ink really was an amplified portion of someone's DNA, it wouldn't be hard to replicate simply by doing PCR on all the notable strands in the broth. If there's enough for some Olympic "official" to wave a wand over and detect, there's enough to replicate. PCR is not hard - the July 2000 issue of Scientific American has a method by which you can perform it at home with a couple hundred dollars worth of easily-obtained equipment (which they will sell you at cost). If it's worth going to the trouble of sewing in labels to counterfeit this junk clothing, it'll be just as worth brewing up a big batch of ink to spray on (in fact it'll probably be cheaper).
Further assuming they're not full of horse manure with this announcement, why would they use human DNA? Symbolic value? Any sort of plant or animal DNA would have worked, and there are probably other kinds better suited to this sort of application - but it makes a better, more mystically valid-seeming announcement if it's a human athlete.
I suspect they're using some typical glow-in-the-dark chemical ink of the sort that's been in use for at least a decade, and the DNA nonsense is just misdirection. I don't believe the Olympic brownshirts running after street vendors would really have the equipment or clue to test for a particular sequence of human DNA, though they could test for the presence of any DNA (as many other not particularly remarkable chemicals). The existing special inks would probably be harder to replicate, ironically enough, because that's one of their specific design goals.
This is trendy, high-tech seeming hype. Fortunately for the Olympic committee, this clothing and paraphrenalia is destined to have it's valuelessness exposed in a few months anyway, so their "security" measures (including this obfuscation) don't have to hold up for very long anyway.
Personally I'll just watch the Special Olympics, the last bastion of what the modern Olympics were supposed to stand for before T-shirts and $#@$!ing pins took over...

Scientific American had an article about MRAM a while ago. You appear to be confusing two things.. RDRAM and DDR DRAM are about the way the ram communicates with the rest of the computer, while magnetic ram is a different storage technology on the memory chips themselves, like SRAM, and thus could be used instead of DRAM on both Rambus and regular DDR memory modules.

Or you could grow your own. Scientific American for August has this article on growing your own plankton. Processors couldn't be much more complicated than rotifers, eh?

it's one of those things that SOUNDS good prima facie, like "gets your message out to 25 million email addresses! Unlimited Income opportunity!!!" just a little thought (again see a recent SciAm) reveals that it's like trying to listen for fleas next to Niagra Falls - In a Universe of powerful quasars and other radio sources any intelligent signal (unless the ET's are modulating a pulsar or something and somehow beaming it our way) would be way too puny to detect. You stand about as much chance as winning the powerball, hitting 18 holes in one, getting hit by lightning AND a meteorite all on the same day.

Just thought some of you might like a more in-depth look at neutron stars. I've been doing some reading on neutron stars in the last few days, so I hunted around in my browser's history and found the two articles I had been reading.

The first one, by New Scientist, is a neat article on stars and their hunger for the planets around them.

The second one, by Scientific American, is a bit technical, but it describes how the X-ray emissions from neutron stars are being used to estimate their size.

--

so we have these huge things floating around... suppose one of them entered out system? i suppose it would be captured and begin orbiting our sun also, but think of the damage it would do before settling down (if it ever would).

perhaps the next great "comet" movie should be about a free floating planet or star :)

.sigs are dumb!

1) Because all those people online are having FUN! The people who are NOT online can't stand it and want to put a stop to it.

2) To generate funds for a manned mission to Mars.

3) To increase certainty and stability, since the only things you can depend on is death and taxes.

4) Pay off the hugh US national mountain of debt - of course investors in T-bills won't like having their taxpayer "pay or go to jail" backed high grade securities, bonds and debt obligations retired.

5) Bread and Circuses for all!

6) Military buildup for upcoming nuke war w/ China over Formosa

7) Funds for free health care

8) Expand White House summer intern program

9) Because everything is taxed.

Finally, the top reason to tax internet deals:

10) To fund the final stages of the US shift to global socialism, where there are no possessions! No work or need to compete for a living! Everything is free! The lion lays down with the lamb, and peace, harmony, sibling love and understanding comes to all, bombers turn into butterflys - This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...yada dada dada dada da.

I'm so glad to read about the fantastic success of Galileo, and the great scientific results it is producing. I remember, as a child, sitting at my TRS-80 downloading articles from the local planetarium's BBS at 300 baud about the upcoming launch of Galileo. I read about it's trajectory, VEEGA (Venus-Earth-Earth Gravity Assist) long before I had any idea how a gravity assist worked.

I would like to see more flybys of Callisto too. Of course, if the mission gets extended another 14 months, surely there'll be time for study of Callisto in addition to the other 3 big moons.

Good idea about re-engineering the communication system. However, I'd bet the transmitter couldn't send pings powerful enough to get any discernible data, especially with the problems it's had (failure of the main antenna to unfurl). The magnetic disturbances the probe detected are a damn good indicator of a conducting (salt-water) sphere, though. As sophomore physics teaches us, a conductor naturally cancels any magnetic field it's embedded in. So when the probe detects a weakened field around the moon, you can deduce that the moon has a conducting sphere.

As for energy to support life, I tend to agree with you. Europa's proximity to Jupiter, as well as resonance with Io and Ganymede, cause a lot of tidal flexing, and this flexing generates a lot of heat. Enough heat to allow water to exist in a liquid state, IMHO, would be enough heat to support single-celled organisms.

I really enjoyed this Times article. It referred to the Scientific American article, which turns out to be available online here. Check it out. More great details and more pretty pictures!

Do you belive that the creation of Negative Energy in the lab, even in nearly unmeasurable amounts, will be an obtainable goal in the next 10 to 15 years? If so do you think that it will make possible the proof of theroies about fater than light travel and wormholes?

Also how do you think this will change peoples views on Einstien's Theroies? If at all.

From Scientific American Article Summries:

Negative Energy, Wormholes and Warp Drive
Lawrence H. Ford and Thomas A. Roman
Contrary to a popular misconception, Albert Einsteins theories do not strictly forbid either faster-than-light travel or time travel. In principle, by harnessing the elusive force of negative energy, one can shorten stellar distances by bending space-time around would-be star trekkers.

Some news site somewhere talked about this. There are a number of other fun things to try. You can also try other things like:

"Best Operating System"

This gives you the "Linux home page" as the top match.

Oddly enough, if you type "Best Operating System in the World", you get Microsoft.com, followed by the "Linux Home Page", a FreeBSD link and a Debian link.

All this is just a consequence of the way the system works. Interested parties should check out this article in Scientific American.

I suppose it is only a matter of time before site authors start trying to influence all this.

This is the actual site at MIT: www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/raw/

The Oxygen project is part of the Labortatory of Computer Science at MIT, but it's kind of a pain to get direct info off of MIT's site. The best I could find is a list of articles of LCS in the news, that includes the Scientific American articles. www.lcs.mit.edu/news/inthenews/

It seems to be a new project (started in April) with a lot of money (38 million from DARPA), and, I'm sure this will piss some of you off, a new 20 million dollar facility donated by - you guessed it - Bill Gates.

From these articles, I get the impression that the technology goes a ways beyond FPGA's, because it is actually a whole bunch of processing units tiled together, and they plan to run multiple "programs" at once by varying the paths through the tiles. So, the chip could be a custom video chip and a radio and a cell phone at the same time. The last line in the article kind of sums it up:"...within a couple of decades there will be only three kinds of chips in the world: Raw chips, memory chips and, of course, potato chips." As long as we still have potato chips...

Actually, I remember reading something about the possibility of teleportation/action at a distance in relation to entanglement. I don't remember where, but check out this article from Scientific American for some cool info.

The MIT project you are thinking of is probably the RAW project. The web site is a bit sparse - not much more than a list of all of the groups research papers. You can get a bit more info about the project in the latest Scientific American in the section about MIT's Oxygen project (hey the article is actually online too - go read it here. Note that it is aimed at the general public, so it's on the simplistic side).

Here is the July SA letter to the editor and reply: Black Holes at Brookhaven?

Scientific American has some information on this.

-Ben Shniper