Slashdot Mirror

"Post scarcity". Is that geekspeak for "technology will fix everything"?

If you figure out a way for technology to eliminate the scarcity of something as simple as water, then I will begin to take this concept seriously. Until then, it's more Wired Magazine nonsense, totally disconnected from the real world.

Just imagine this: Five years from release of a few of these new plant lines. Turns out that the tomato doesn't cause cancer.

Just imagine people who are allergic to Brazil nuts, which can cause Anaphylactic shock and thus kill the person. Then imagine a gene from the Brazil nut being inserted into soy and having those allergic to Brazil nut having the same reaction to the new soy. Don't think it won't happen? It already has.

Nothardly. 21 hours seems to be an abnormally long burst from what's been observed so far. But it's not the initial burst you really need to worry about.

Have you ever tried it? Just google for "dog blood pressure". Other studies also showed that the mere presence of a dog during a meeting led to fewer "pissing contests" between meeting participants, and more productive meetings, even if all the dog did was sit curled up in a corner ignoring everyone. Not having a pet in the office is costing businesses billions a year in sick days, lost productivity, extra medical costs, etc.

http://hyper.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/38/4 /815 American Heart Association: Pet Ownership, but Not ACE Inhibitor

Therapy, Blunts Home Blood Pressure Responses to Mental Stress

Abstract---- In the present study, we evaluated the effect of a nonevaluative social support intervention (pet ownership) on blood pressure response to mental stress before and during ACE inhibitor therapy. Forty-eight hypertensive individuals participated in an experiment at home and in the physician's office. Participants were randomized to an experimental group with assignment of pet ownership in addition to lisinopril (20 mg/d) or to a control group with only lisinopril (20 mg/d). On each study day, blood pressure, heart rate, and plasma renin activity were recorded at baseline and after each mental stressor (serial subtraction and speech). Before drug therapy, mean responses to mental stress did not differ significantly between experimental and control groups in heart rate (94 [SD 6.8] versus 93 [6.8] bpm), systolic blood pressure (182 [8.0] versus 181 [8.3] mm Hg), diastolic blood pressure (120 [6.6] versus 119 [7.9] mm Hg), or plasma renin activity (9.4 [0.59] versus 9.3 [0.57] ng mL-1 h-1). Lisinopril therapy lowered resting blood pressure by {approx}35/20 mm Hg in both groups, but responses to mental stress were significantly lower among pet owners relative to those who only received lisinopril (P<0.0001; heart rate 81 [6.3] versus 91 [6.5] bpm, systolic blood pressure 131 [6.8] versus 141 [7.8] mm Hg, diastolic blood pressure 92 [6.3] versus 100 [6.8] mm Hg, and plasma renin activity 13.9 [0.92] versus 16.1 [0.58] ng mL-1 h-1). We conclude that ACE inhibitor therapy alone lowers resting blood pressure, whereas increased social support through pet ownership lowers blood pressure response to mental stress.

http://whyfiles.org/shorties/cat_stress.html

As the experiment began, the subjects started controlling their blood pressure with lisinopril, an inhibitor of angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE). Although lisinopril reduced systolic pressure to an average of 123 mm, it was far less effective in controlling the rise in pressure that occurs during stress.

Better than drugs!

At the outset, half the broker-guinea pigs were directed to choose a cat or a dog as a pet. The fun part came when these guinea pigs were asked to do mental arithmetic -- or (we love it!) -- to respond to an experimenter who, posing as a client, demanded: "Upon your advice, I lost $86,000. What are you going to do about it?"

The demand stressed the non-pet owners enough to essentially cancel the benefit of the ACE inhibitor, Allen says, yet the systolic pressure among pet owners rose only 9 mm. Furthermore, their pulse rose by 10 beats per minute, less than half the 21-beat rise seen in the control group.

In other words, pets were much better at reducing the stress-induced rise in blood pressure than the drug.

http://www.wcanews.com/archives/2000/Feb/feb00j.ht m

Pets prove better than drug for high blood pressure

High blood pressure has become one of the most common health problems in the country today, a byproduct of high-stress and poor diet. To correct the problem, many medical doctors have turned to drugs, such as ACE inhibitors.

It's really trendy here on /. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns.

The average SUV weighs 4242 lbs and gets 19 MPG. Larger ones like the Escalade are rated at 13 MPG in the city. The cargo for your average grocery store trip is, let's say, 100 lbs. A tractor-trailer rig is somewhere around 25,000 pounds empty, gets 5-6 MPG when loaded, and carries up to 40,000 lbs cargo. Let's assume that the average is half that. If I did the math right, moving groceries by semi is then 57 times more efficient.

As a kicker, truckers use 13% of fuel purchased in the US versus 63% for cars and other light vehicles. So you're right about the "pale" part, but it appears to be the other way around.

I'm sure that BBC picked the Thomas quote for the same reason that I chose to include it in the post - it provides a reasonably concise answer to the "why do I care about this?" question for most people. And I haven't seen anybody yet describe the various caveats of the Standard Model and its extensions in one sentence.

Perhaps the closest is a recent Why Files story, which gives a good summary of Big Bang cosmology, updated from the recent microwave background measurements. You're right, that up to 3/4 of the mass is in dark energy, whatever that might be. You're also correct that there are a lot more neutrinos (and photons) than atoms (or protons). And apparently, because of the large numbers of neutrinos, their masses could matter if they were heavy enough. According to Wikipedia, for example, "If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electron volts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse." The fact the Universe does not collapse is actually used to determine limits on possible neutrino masses (0.3 eV).

Neutrino masses also affect the fine-tuning of the Standard Model (SM), so any new experimental results will make a generation of graduate students and theorists happy, as the current problem is finding significant enough discrepancies in the SM to provide direction for fixing it in the future. Having results from several different experiments, which effectively look for oscillations on different length-scales (Earth-to-Sun vs. 10s or 100s of miles), provides additional constraints in that search.

Neutrino astronomy is something that requires much larger detectors, such as Ice Cube. At the moment, the models of neutrino production in the Sun were actually used to look for flavor oscillations, not the other way around, so neutrino astronomy is primarily intended for cosmological measurements. And hard as it is to detect neutrinos, we still have not been able to detect any gravitational waves, so the two are not competitors as astronomy methods, and won't be for a while. Perhaps you were thinking of solar quakes being used to probe the interior of the Sun?

There is some evidence that happiness may lead to success: http://whyfiles.org/shorties/193success_happy/

Hence, it may be worth the extra effort to bring yourself to happiness to improve your chances for success, health and strong relationships.

Truly Chernobyl is an extreme and ill-fitting example...

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

The RBMK-1000 reactor specifically is known to have design flaws which creates safety issues.

The pebble bed reactor has known design flaws. These are valid issues.

All of the pebble bed reactors either in operation or planned are significantly smaller, on the order 100~200 MW of electric power and 200~400 MW of thermal energy (note the increase in efficiency)

Pebble bed reactors are designed to be modular. Source Reactor sites lack containment building for this exact reason. A fully equipped reactor would have to supply a comparable amount of electricity to be economically feasible, hence would need several pebble beds per facility. Extra beds alone increases risk.

So to make the blanket statement any fission reactor has the potential to create a catastrophe equal to the Chernobyl incident is to simultaneous ignore the design improvements in both safety & efficiency since the RBMK was designed, some 60 some odd years ago and to ignore the implementation details of existing and planned reactors.

Most likely, Chernobyl is not going to happen again. But a Chernobyl type accident is certainly on the cards if nuclear energy becomes popular. Safety and efficiency will only be as good as human fallability, and there is always room for error. Worst case scenario at a nuclear power plant is still orders of magnitude worse than worst case scenario at any other power generation station with the exception of a major dam. The west won't be the only place where these reactors might be built.

I've looked at the evidence. From what I've seen, pebble bed reactors are not some magic wand that can wave away the danger of a nuclear incident. It is fundamentally the same game, with more advanced technology. I believe that it is possible to use nuclear energy safely, but I am yet to be convinced of the competance of those responsible to do so, with the possible exception of those in France.

To cap it all off, there are questions on whether fission is really all that cost efficient by comparision to other methods, paticularly hydroelectric power.

I just don't think fission is ready for the big time.

Kuru (a common prion disease from cannibalism) is also known as Laughing Death. That's right.. I've got my eye on you laughers and I know what you're up to. You know who you are.

By the same token we should expect life on the moon shouldn't we?

Furthermore, the only place where water has been SUGGESTED to possibly occur on the moon is at the poles in permanently shaded bottoms of craters in the form of hydrated minerals and in fine and sparse ice dust among the dirt.

I wouldn't take THAT bet! The only place we know of in the solar system which is "flooded with hydrocarbons" is Titan.

If you don't believe me, Google is your friend.

"After more than 30 years of bombarding fruit flies in the lab with radiation and other mutation inducing poisons, all they have been able to come up with is retarded fruit flies." And fruit flies which live 70% longer than average. http://whyfiles.org/shorties/070old_fly/ Those experiments were targetted at discovering how genetic mutations can go wrong. An analogy is that where normal mutations are like rain, these were like dropped buckets on people. Whole groups of genes were knocked out. And obviously, the chances of causing damage is high. In any case, many of the mutations caused are neutral, even if they were radical. Eye-colour changes, and body colour changes have no effect on survivability. Mutation has also consistently produced new 'species' of virii and bacteria. Losing organs is not 'loss of information'. There is no rigourous concept like you are thinking of in genetics. Turning a switch off is not very different from turning a switch on.

The arguement that evolution is impossible because of the odds is pure balony.

The critical error is that while humans have 3 billion base pairs, humans did not just magically come together randomly in 4 billion years, first came single celled organisms and so on. From here: http://whyfiles.org/shorties/count_bact.html it estimates that bacteria produce 10^29 cells a year on earth, giving plenty of chances for mutations that led to more complex life. So it only needs to be shown that bacteria could evolve from amino acids. Basing beliefs on probabilities is far more rational than some magical invisible guy that you have absolutely no proof for. I pity delusional children like you.

FYI, check the ozone over Switzerland. It doesn't show the extreme cuts of the spring ozone holes, but it ought to show you that depletion is not just a polar phenomenon either. (There's a more general mid-latitude graph down near the bottom of this page.)

The air and water seem pretty good. Weather seems normal.

WTF ?

Europeans dislike us, some HATE us

Yeah, sure, that's why they poured litres of ketchup in the streets and renamed it "Freedom Tomato Paste". Oh wait... </pointless controversy>

As a side note, the one thing that we deeply dislike about Americans is precisely this stubborn refusal to give a fsck about the consequences that their actions have over the rest of the world.

Arguments of "Americans are selfish and stupid" are not likely to pursuade.

How do you expect people to react to a discourse that can be summarised as this: "We're the US, so we'll keep churning out CO2 because it will make us richer and most of the short term consequences will affect other countries anyway" ?

Thomas-

If that's what you wanted to ask, you probably shouldn't have brought up the matter of one "defined" year not exactly equalling an Earth year, et cetera.

The method you state of measuring accuracy is one way, the most simplistic. There are, however, others, depending on the amount of knowledge you have regarding the processes whose results you are measuring.

From this website:

Just curious: How do you judge the accuracy of the most accurate clock in the world? It might be kinda boring, watching the dial for 6 million years, waiting for it to lose a second, and you couldn't exactly compare the clock to that Rolex you bought in Hong Kong. In fact, all those lofty error rates are not based on observation but rather on calculations reflecting physicists' understanding of the errors remaining. "Scientists are capable of evaluating the clocks and predicting error all by themselves, without referring it to something more accurate," says Collier Smith, a public affairs specialist at NIST. "By going back to first principles, they can determine what the uncertainties are."

That site also discusses various applications for high-accuracy clocks (or time measurement devices, since everyone seems to think clock = time on the wall only), for those who think that keeping wall time is the only function of timepiece.

The Radiation Reassessed page, a NSF sponsored project, discusses the cancer statistics for Hiroshima survivors. Here's the relevant quote: However, it's worth noting that among about 52,000 survivors who received at least .005 sieverts (0.5 rem) of radiation, 420 excess cancer deaths have been blamed on radiation, while about 7,600 other cancer deaths were due to other causes. That's hardly the kind of cancer epidemic that many people associate with the word "radiation."

Less than 1% died of radiation included cancers. A much larger fraction must be assumed to have suffered from non-fatal cancers or other ill effects. Still, the radiation exposure was far from the dominant health effect in the lives of those people.

The point is that the perception most or all radiation victims suffered health effects is wrong. The primary effects of the atomic bomb were immediate, not lingering.

If suffering among the GI victims is as widespread as stories make it sound, then at least some of it must be attributed to the nocebo effect. [Nocebo is the opposite of placebo effect. If someone tells you that you ought to feel bad, you do feel bad.]

Are you suggesting that a planet the size of earth will evaporate, becoming smaller? So first, it gathers all this material, then for some unknown reason starts losing it? What is the mechanism for the reversal?

This kind of thinking shakes my faith in scientists.

I will disagree on one point. The sheep these days never accept blame, and make claim that the designer was an idiot, and it's obviously just junk.

And I do agree with your point about OSS. Many times it would almost take a genious to follow those directions to the letter, but even if you did, it would most likely fail. You have to think on your feet to spot little details for your particular situation (as everyone has their own unique situation) and make adjustments.

The musical genius recognizes that the markings on the paper are one genius talking to another genius, saying, "Hey, look at this idea," and interprets the music.

That reminds me of Mozart's "Ein musikalischer Spass". Only now people are starting to realize the true genious behind it. Ironic that any "bird brain" could have figured it out. ;-)

Naturally, I'm partial to jokes... even subtle ones.

Antibiotics are being over-used in home products (and also in factory farm livestock feed). The problem is that the antibiotics in, say, hand soap, really don't do anything to further protect you from germs. In fact, then tend to breed germs populations that become resistant from exposure. If this is kept up, we might face 'super germs' in the future that are resistant to all of our antibiotics.

Of course, I'm not blaming you personally. The industry needs to stop adding antibiotics to household soaps.

That law could infact be used if the object in question was to be accelerated with ion thrusters ; However it would take a few hundred (more?) years to get it into "hypervelocity". Or, for some _real_ havoc: decide who you're gonna blow up a few millenias before you do. =)

I'll let Weimann (researcher at JILA, Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, his group was the first to create a BEC) do my talking for me since I only have an overview understanding of the topic:

"Although superfluid helium exists in conditions much warmer than the Bose-Einstein condensate that the Colorado researchers made, it is widely considered a Bose-Einstein condensate, even though it is in a very different sort of system than Einstein was talking about."[1]

Additionally in a Bose condensed gas strong interactions in the fluid state are eliminated making the system easier to understand and measure its properties.[2, 3]

So while it may be arguable whether its a new state of matter, based on how different the state is from a superfluid state, it is important because it makes the study of these systems in detail possible by eliminating many confounding interactions.[2]

Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.

What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.

As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause.

(1) Land surfaces are only 30 percent of the Earth's surface; and the area of the U.S. is only a few percent at most of Earth's surface. Since area weighting of all global land and sea surface temperature data is used to get global data sets, this modifi ed urban heat island effect - if it's real - would have a very small effect on the computed global warming.

When the early global warming models, which did not account for cooling caused by aerosols (which are also produced by burning coal and oil), were changed, the new models have forecast average temperatures "right on the nose," says Schneider.

Borehole temperatures can also provide an independent instrumental validation of surface measurements. Pollack et al.'s (1998) analysis of underground temperature measurements from four continents indicates that the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by about 0.5 C in the twentieth century.

I'd like to thank the author on so many excellent points. He probably knows that this article will be met with flame.

Unfortunatly, I have a parallel set of horror stories.

I think there are a number of factors have brought this situation around but the predominant factor is the Peter principle on a mass scale for management at technology companies.

This has happened as a symptom of fighting between the technologically challenged and the technologically gifted continue because of failure to communicate. Software engineers (any engineers) live in the reality warp between social needs and scientific envelopes. Hence the difficulty for some managers to truly comprehend what engineers are saying. For a software enginner to be successful, they must bend their reality to meet artificial and often nonsensical goals. When a software engineer meets a near absolute issue, it is often impossible for them to communicate the level of risk. Hence the technically challenged management is unable to comprehend the gravity of the risk. Hence the ultimate breakdown of trust.

Example scenario:

IT administrator wants to "be more secure" and rules on creating a firewall. (often for selfish purposes - i.e. to attain experience) Engineer's job just got harder and asks IT guy for reasoning. IT guy responds with a "management told me" response. Engineer grunts in disapproval and moves on because the past experiences with discussing this with management have never been fruitful. As a cancer grows so does this process and finally, no-one does anything.

This has nothing to do with large companies, I've seen it happen in small companies as well.

I have managed many software development teams in large and small companies (as the director of SW dev) and I often have had to simply ask that my engineering team do all the administration. It's amazing how a bunch of smart developers can take the job of 5 administators and turn it into an hour a month kind of duty. Hence, I now look for developers that are skilled in all aspects of computers, from writing software to being able to administer an installation of machines.

If you look at high profile examples (like *both* Space Shuttle disasters) you can see that this problem is endemic in the a bureaucracy as one of the evolutionary stages. Unfortunatly, if the management at the very top of an organization can't understand this, the outcome is inevitable.

Here are some URL's and you can see what is happening in the world where management and engineers fail to communicate:
http://whyfiles.org/185accident/index.html
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/ecology/le sson.htm
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/031120.Ra manujam.errors.html

I think you need to see if people prefer beautiful chickens before you can jump to that conclusion.

I assume (based on this article) that we've been watching the skies for 100 years, and that this has been the closest pass in that time. That means that any give year we have a 1 in 25,000,000 chance of an impact.

Based on this simple history it's apparent that there have been 2 impacts of similarly sized asteroids in the past 500 years. Either A) my impact probability is off by 5 orders of magnitude or B) this has been a quiet century for near-misses. That kind of statistical variation is unlikely, so what's wrong with my numbers?

Assuming that we've only been able to accurately record near-misses for 20 years drops my probability of impact to 1 in 5 million. Based on that answer there should have been 1/10000th of an impact in the past 500 years. My answer is still off by 4 orders of magnitude. Assuming independent asteroids of 1m volume I go down to 1 order of magnitude error.

I'm going to keep thinking about it, but I have to do a problem set now. I'm interested if anyone sees a flaw in my logic or math, or simply has comments.

Walford has been researching and writing up his results with mice for years. His retort to fad discoveries is to "show me your old mouse".

Recently, an article appeared describing how he' subjecting himself to his own regimen of reduced caloric intake to improve longevity.

He admits it's difficult for people to restrain their diets, but he believes it's necessary if you want to live to be 120 years old.

In addition to quantity, there's the whole issue of diet composition, which is the second part of Calorie Restriction Optimum Nutrition.

The USDA food pyramid is an improvement over the basic 4 food groups I learned when I was young, but it's still been criticized, there are serious profits in making up our current set of foodstuffs.

But others have suggested alternatives that place the carbohydrate group as a smaller portion and put fruits and vegetables as the pyramid base.

The latter would be much more consistent with a hunter gatherer diet that predates agriculture and, IMHO, probably is more closely aligned with the way our bodies were meant to digest food. Our bodies have only recently begun to adapt to the advent of agriculture adn they certainly haven't adapted yet to modern high sugar diets (witness especially the incidence of diabetes among ethnic groups with less exposure to agriculture).

Oh well, soon enough we'll re-engineer ourselves to take power from whatever is highest energy density. Maybe nitromethane:)

Thanks for the support, it's always good to know kind people are on the 'net to help. I found the thing I was looking for referred to more directly as The Corpse Flower and that was the name I most identify with it. Never heard of something with the specific "decaying fish" armoa, just the non-descript "flesh." Also of note a Corpse Flower is in bloom in California I beleive, and that made local news.

Thanks for your help.

I agree 100% and make a comparison with Werner Von Braun...

Here is one important difference between Mitnick and von Braun. Mitnick was charged, and convicted for his crimes. And he then served his time, and served his parole. Von Braun was never even charged.

What is the phrase Americans use? Mitnick "paid his debt to society."

As for the deaths von Braun was responsible for? Some of the later correspondents in this thread are allowing him the defense Tom Lehrer suggested in his satirical song,

" Ze go up in the air, but where they come down,
'Zat's not my department!' say Werner von Braun."

Von Braun wasn't just in charge of a big research project. He was also a Nazi party member. I have heard people defend his Nazi party membership. They say something like this, "C'mon, he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to build rockets."

Well, von Braun wasn't just a Nazi. He oversaw the construction of the rockets too. And, as such, he was responsible for the employment of slave labor.

The Nazis held captive members of ethnic groups they didn't like, political prisoners, and homosexuals, and they worked them to death. 15,000 slave labourers worked in von Braun's factories I heard.

"Von Braun's complicity in Nazi atrocities is less clear, Neufeld said. But there is at least one document _ a letter _ in which von Braun discusses a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he apparently spoke to the commandant about obtaining more skilled laborers to use at Mittelwerk."

This site says one of his plants contained a concentration camp that employed 40,000 slave laborers.

• African Edventure
• Reaching Beyond Borders
• Africa Overland Network
• How Stuff Works
• Kids' Democracy Project
• On the trail of Emporer Norton
• Emporer Norton's Archives
• The Why Files

Here's a few sites that'll be maybe at the very limits of the kids' grasp and understanding. But that's good. They should be challenged to learn "the next step up", rather than being fed dumbed-down Barney crud. There's nothing in these pages that a parent can object to (unless they happen to be diehard creationists).

http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html

The Tree of Life is a collaborative web project, produced by biologists from around the world. On more than 2600 World Wide Web pages, the Tree of Life provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their history, and characteristics.

http://whyfiles.org/

"Science behind the news"

http://www.seds.org/billa/tnp/

The Nine Planets is an overview of the history, mythology, and current scientific knowledge of each of the planets and moons in our solar system. Each page has text and images, some have sounds and movies, most provide references to additional related information.


http://parallel.park.org/Canada/Museum/extinctio n/ tablecont.html
Extinctions: Cycles of Life and Death Through Time (more than just the dinosaurs 65 million years ago)

• Approval voting, where you cast one vote for every candidate you approve of, and the results are added up;
• The Borda count, where you rank the candidates in order of preference;
• The Condorcet method, similar to Borda but the results are counted differently.

We now know that low-level radiation is simply far less harmful (and far better understood) than we thought it was in the 1950's.

This statement is a bit optimistic. The data for the amount of harm caused by low doses of radiation is murky at best, and isn't good enough to reach any conclusions.

The "straight line extrapolation" (known in the business as the "Linear No Threshold" theory) is a conservative policy position while waiting for enough data to pile up that we can understand what is safe and what the effects of low doses are. There is a pretty balanced discussion of our lack of understanding of low doses of radiation at this site.

It's legalese, "fraudulent" being defined as anything that's demonstrably false -- get-rich-quick etc. This leaves all the "non-fraudulent" enter-now-to-win and marketing crap perfectly legal (but no less annoying). As long as people keep biting and buying stuff marketed through spam, it's not going to stop. There's some useful info on the various legal resources to spam here. The definition differs continent to continent, country to country and state to state.

When reading up on the atomic clock on this site, I read mention aobut the mercury ion clock which would be, when finished, 1000 times more accurate than the standard caesium atomic clock: http://whyfiles.org/078time/2.html

More competition for the new laser-clock, but at 1008 Billion signals per second, I see a major advantage in his laser-research.

Peter Delfyett's area of focus is "increasing the speed of fiber-optic systems" because, according to his research, in the current fibre-optic system:

"beams from several separate lasers, each costing about $1,000, send light wavelengths at the same speed at the same time down the line and the total speed is calculated by multiplying the number of wavelengths by their pulse rates."

Delfyette's current area of research led him to use a "mode-lock laser". This is used to "control the timing and the number of wavelengths that are simultaneously generated"

If you can't see where I'm going with this, think about fibre-optic communications, particularly Fibre-Optic Broadband. This new system can generate 1008 Billion signals per second, each signal having the ability to carry one digital bit, and all this from just one laser, instead of many expensive, bulky convergance lasers. The implications of Peter's new laser-research include the fact that if you had a single fibre-optic fibre for broadband internet access, it would give you a maximum download speed of 120162.9638671875 Megabytes per second, unless I'm mistaken which I could be because my mathematics isn't the best. At any rate, it's much faster than today's fibre-optic broadband connections. Also, since the fibre-optic lines themselves need not be changed, only new laser-systems installed, this technology could be implemented into all current major fibre-optic networks.

I can see Peter's research coming in very handy in the future of land-based communications.

I'm capped, and yet I still whore.

DNA, as I'm sure we all know, is double stranded. One strand is a complement of the other. A complements T and C complements G. So, if one strand is:
5' ATTTC 3'

then the other strand is:
3' TAAAG 5'

The DNA is "read" from 5' to 3'. 5' and 3' refer to particular atoms on the sugar backbone that are attached to one another via a phosphate.

When DNA is replicated, you split it into two strands:
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'

(notice that the two complements read in opposite directions)

and each strand has it's complement added.

5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
3' TAAAG 3' and 3' CTTTA 5'

The problem with this is, in order for this happen to DNA, you need an RNA "primer." This primer is a complement to the beggining of what you want to replicate. So, for example, if you have (RNA bases I'm putting in bold. U is the same as T:)

UAA

floating around in solution, which compliments ATT, then any sequence beggining with ATT will be replicated, but other sequences will NOT be replicated, because no RNA primer is available to get them started.

So, if you have a whole mess of DNA, including a piece that you're interested in, which reads:

5' ATTTG (long space........) TCGTC 3'
3' TAAAC (long space........) AGGAG 5'

and you add:
TAAAC and TCGTC

You get a chain reaction; the sequence flanked by the complements of the two things you add (the sequence printed above) is replicated, and then the replication product is replicated, and so on and so on. Other sequences, which are flanked by only one compliment (only ATTTG, say) will be replicated occasionally, but there replication products cannot in turn replicate, so you get no chain reaction.

More history here.

A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase (an enzyme which polymerises, that is to say replicates sequences of, nucleic acids like DNA and RNA) that works extremely fast at high temperatures. In general, the higher the temperature you run a reaction at, the faster it goes. However, most biological enzymes (from, say, a person) cease to function when temperatures rise (this is one of the ways heat kills you.) Thermophiles, bacteria that live in geysers and in volcanic ocean vents, have evolved enzymes that continue to function at higher temperatures.

Couple of photos I haven't seen on other sites here - as well as a video of it swimming (in QT).

OK, so you're telling me that finding something, but not even knowing what you're looking for or what it looks/sounds/is like is a worthy endeavour? It's like hoping some alien civilization 'speaks your language.' Good luck with that.

You've got 2 problems:
1. Does an alien civilization even exist? If you believe in evolution, the actual probabilities of this being possible would basically need twice the amount of time to occur, given just pure random chance, correct? Considering scientists calculations that say the universe is ~12 billion years, and our earth has been around for ~4.5 billion years, do you really think there is only a 1 in 2.25 billion chance (1/2 4.5 billion years) that another alien civilization very similar to ours exists in this universe?! Those are ridiculously good odds.
2. Have you even seen the number of man years it takes to locate one key value in an RC5 project?! Suffice it to say that SETI is RC5 multiplied hundred of thousands of billions of times more complicated. You think it will ever be solved? The obvious answer, given the time from #1 above, is: NO!

OK, so you're telling me that finding something, but not even knowing what you're looking for or what it looks/sounds/is like is a worthy endeavour? It's like hoping some alien civilization 'speaks your language.' Good luck with that.

You've got 2 problems:
1. Does an alien civilization even exist? If you believe in evolution, the actual probabilities of this being possible would basically need twice the amount of time to occur, given just pure random chance, correct? Considering scientists calculations that say the universe is ~12 billion years, and our earth has been around for ~4.5 billion years, do you really think there is only a 1 in 2.25 billion chance (1/2 4.5 billion years) that another alien civilization very similar to ours exists in this universe?! Those are ridiculously good odds.
2. Have you even seen the number of man years it takes to locate one key value in an RC5 project?! Suffice it to say that SETI is RC5 multiplied hundred of thousands of billions of times more complicated. You think it will ever be solved? The obvious answer, given the time from #1 above, is: NO!

Gravity is Not really a force ;)

I guess it matters relative to (no pun intended) if you are looking at the questions as Newton or Einstein.
"Gravity is the result of four-dimensional space-time being warped by the presence of mass"

consider this, "We constantly fall back on the belief that gravity is a force even when we know otherwise"

And from the WhyFiles,The six-minute guide to space-time, "Einstein concluded that gravity was a property of space-time, not a separate force."

There is a herbal extract that causes the body to over-metabolize fatty acids, as well as stimulate the premature release of fatty acids from fat cells (this is good). They are these honking gelcaps and you take 2-3 of them a day usually before you eat.

Controlled studies showed on average that subjects lost 1 pound of body fat per month without a change in diet or excercise.

A search on google will find you a bazillion hits, most of them trying to sell you stuff.
A jar of 60 gelcaps costs around 10-15 canadian dollars, price may vary where you live.

link
another link

First off, it's not even a fan site. It's an entirely unrelated site that is all about science. I thought you couldn't enforce trademarks if they were in another realm of commerce?

Second, it's whyfiles.org. Not Y-Files.com. Not even whyfiles.com. Would anyone in his right mind think that this dilutes the X-Files trademark?

I don't know what Fox is smoking (apparently the cheap stuff), but I sincerely hope they don't manage to win this legal battle. That would be a sad day indeed.