No one makes nanoparticles in large quantity by vapor deposition. You react the silicon to a suitable precursor and then reduce it gently. It's a very high yielding reaction. Silicon tetrachloride would be one example of a precursor you could use (I think there's a few others - there's a guy in my lab who makes a lot of silicon quantum dots).
The big question is how easy it is to go from silicic acid back to nanoparticles - if it can be done electrochemically and relatively efficiently then what's been discovered is a very efficient catalytic process for cracking hydrogen from water.
This is a good goal, because although Unison is one of the best tools out there, it's still limited in a lot of ways (tends to enforce a star topology). I've had an idea banging around in my head for a long while that some type of distributed protocol would be preferable - use a BitTorrent tracker to let computers find each other, then let the most recent copy amongst them to sync (with some conflict resolution logic).
Are "seed factories" even possible with current levels of tech? I thought we needed molecular manufacturing to build credible devices.
The way I see it, currently we lack the "pre-requisite" technology to do practical space exploitation like this. If we had molecular manufacturing, we could mass produce rocket components autonomously in giant automated factories on earth that can self replicate the parts used in themselves. We could build true von neuman probes and spacecraft that could go out and build real seed factories, etc to really do it.
Large space stations with thousands of inhabitants, etc would all be possible.
But step 0 is R&D in developing molecular manufacturing, which requires an enormous research effort. Right now, there's a few scientists poking around with simulations of a method to covalently bond carbon to other carbon on a surface. This should be where all the research dollars go.
You don't. What you need is clever optimization of your tooling - basically finding out the minimal expected life of all your components, so you can launch something which can produce X number of sub-machines before breaking down and needing replacement.
And yet, I would argue it's an ongoing disaster that a lot of the time we're not really trying to quantify these types of parameters. Nothing is gained if we require everyone to go through the exact same learning exercise, and we never actually dissect the common problems and figure out what causes them.
It's not a problem with the scientific method, it's a problem of communicating results. Clearly it isn't working optimally if this article is correct. If people can only tell each other when something works, but can't discuss when things don't work, then the communication channels are severely broken.
This is actually a huge problem.
Science really needs something like Freenode for different disciplines. A lot of the time you simply want to be able to talk to some of the people dealing with the work in the original group, since they're likely to be able to give you the small details which turn out to matter.
Do you not understand the purpose of peer-review? If results that were peer-reviewed are not reproducible, that is not a failing of the scientific method itself, nor is it a failing of peer review. Peer review does not exist to validate methods as that would be quite nearly an impossible task for the majority of all scientific papers that are published currently unless the journal sent an editor to the lab that submitted said paper to rerun the work themselves - which would be so absurdly expensive that nobody would ever pay to publish. Peer review is intended to make sure that work published is scientifically rigorous and well written.
Many of the published results and methods being verified are ones that have questionable results - such as producing too much output chemicals or reactions don't appear they should work at all. Those are papers for which peer-review has failed to provide adequate review. If the paper was truly read in-depth by other equally qualified scientists these issues would have been noticed and the paper (published or not) would have been called into question.
The caveat to this would be papers that are published with the sole purpose of seeking peer review and inviting other to validate the results, for example many of the cold fusion papers and the experiment which implied neutrinos were traveling faster than light.
I also recognize that peer review happens both before and after publication, and in fact the bloggers are part of the peer-review process.
Also frankly, there's a ton of papers out there which do work but which omit crucial details of how they work. Queue 2 years of my life discovering that someone's "simple robust synthesis" can't possibly have worked the way they said it did, and gradually reverse engineering that they were doing something they didn't report in any papers which had an important effect (they didn't quite seal up the reaction vial, but didn't leave it open, so coupled with water and condensation they were setting up a highly unreliable oxygen headspace control system - rig up a reliable way to fix the mol % and hey, anyone can do it!).
I've very much become convinced that the terse writing style which gets encouraged in a lot of chemistry papers is just not useful at all when it comes to replicating them (and protocol papers are worse - people write still write what they were trying to do, not necessarily what actually gets done more often then not).
Depends on intensity I imagine. The article notes it had to be further then 3000 light years away or they'd have expected it to cause an extinction event - and also that there are "short" and "long" GRBs.
The rule here is to never sign NDA in this case. Go public and burn the company in question with the media. Threatening people with jail when they discover a exploit in software is counter-active and just plain stupid. The president of Skytech clearly doesn't understand software or computers in general. In fact. I am sure that he is just plain capital asshole as you can find them in companies everywhere.
It feels like a better conclusion is "cover your tracks" no matter how white-hat (and basically harmless) what you're doing is, because the world is full of jerk offs.
I believe the current theory on laser communication in space is that it could get up to some serious bandwidth at inter-planetary distances - think 100 mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s - but obviously it's not really been tried yet. Curiosity is only sustaining something like 1.5 mbit/s even even with help from the Mars orbiters.
I'm guessing the real benefit of this type of work was getting some actual data on the types of things which affect tracking and receiving lasers in space, even if only at very low bitrates.
The idea is that KeePass uses a combination of mouse and keyboard input injection to type the password - most loggers only look at keyboard input, which defeats "trivial" cases - after all, if your system is keylogger compromised you have a much bigger problem anyway.
You are using the baseline of drugs which are out there and saying "look at how many are safe!". But you have no comparison of the number of drugs with dangerous, potentially longterm or life-threatening side-effects.
Giving your countless millions induced cancer en masse (or multiple organ failure, or compromised immune systems) would be medical, financial and social disaster. And, most cancer and heart disease drugs simply aren't that efficacious. They're not cures - they're treatments, and a lot of the time they turn out to be no more effective then existing treatments.
Late stage cancer patients may have nothing to lose, but no one has yet produced a legal document which will actually indemnify scientists and doctors against a drug which turns out to very rapidly kill such a patient from litigation by their family - and nor is there a way to create such a thing without opening such people up to potentially widespread mistreatment (since suitably indemnified, you could do pretty much anything and never be sued).
It does somewhat stand to reason though that any thing which lets us thoroughly reduce blood viral loading might open the way to use other treatments to restore people's immune system as well. It still wouldn't be a total cure, but if we could take someone with AIDS back to just being HIV positive, it would an enormous step.
The trouble is that there *have* been a number of cures/vaccines, but HIV mutates so quickly that they were quickly rendered ineffective. HIV can differ significantly even between somebody and the person they were infected by, all depending on how their immune system responds to the infection and what drugs they are given.
The difference here is that the treatment targets several stages of the HIV "life-cycle". In micribiology targeting a single point of weakness of an organism is relatively quickly circumvented, but targeting many points of weakness has a much more devastating effect.
Well, or just targeting something so core to it that any mutation is enormously deleterious to the organism. It turns out the same type of thing is true for a lot of multi-drug resistant bacteria: placed in competition with normal versions, they end up dying out because synthesizing all the drug resistance proteins is very energy expensive.
With any luck, any form of HIV without this protein is going to be similarly hindered.
Plenty of tumor-like things can just disappear. Your body kills off lot's of cancerous cells every day - "cancer" is the kind of inverse-evolution of those the body misses.
Sort of offtopic but I'm a little disappointed that this unfortunate affliction for this person is being spun as a possible "fountain of eternal youth" in the article. Come on, people. We should be working to better understand this so we can help people
Yeah, it's a bit blatant on that point, but saving the lives of 100,000 people every day wouldn't be helping people? A cure for aging would save more lives than a cure for everything else combined.
It's less a cure for aging, and more "eternal youth". That's generally a good thing though, because the current problem with medical science is that we've simply beaten out the things which kill you when you're young and able-bodied - not prevented the general decline of physical and cognitive function which happens over a longer period. What we'd really like to do is keep people "young" longer - ideally a lot longer, so they can continue looking after themselves.
I doubt it would be as hellish as you make it out to be. I for one would love the opportunity to enjoy a severely long life. Unfortunately I seem to be in the majority here. It's frustrating because so many people seem to think it's such a horrible thing I fear progress is going far too slow to achieve any kind of immortality in my life time.
There's emotional benefit to trying to think it would be a bad thing - because presently it's impossible.
See the number of stories which end with someone deciding they don't want the immortality cure and being happy about that, but then if you simply read about the events of the immortals over just long time spans they live interesting lives. Given that the mean time to a fatality by accident is something like 240 years, and it's not like it would be that big of a change - we have people who live to 100 pretty regularly.
He was offered a deal of about four years. If he and/or his lawyers had been so inclined I'd bet they could have bid that down significantly. So any observation that's talking about decades in jail is skipping over some of the facts.
Are you vaguely familiar with what passes for the American prison system? In 4 years, there's a decent chance he'd have been raped repeatedly and possibly contracted a terminal disease.
... If we ever figure out how to control the structure of materials so that the strength of individual chemical bonds is preserved in bulk materials, then we would not only have stronger carbon fibers, but we would also have stronger steel.
It is a special case, but we do have well know examples of how to do this. They are crystals, which are atomically ordered on the macroscale. The manifestation of the strength inherent in the carbon-carbon bond on the macroscale is what bestows upon diamonds their remarkable properties. Single crystal macroscopic parts are manufactured in metallurgy also (turbine blades).
We also have bulk commercial applications of it - nickel super-alloys are grown into very large single crystals for use in airplane propellers/turbine fans. There are no grain boundaries - it's just one big crystal.
That said, there's where the people making artificial diamonds are probably really hoping to go: single crystal diamonds grown to custom order shapes.
Slashdot Mirror
No one makes nanoparticles in large quantity by vapor deposition. You react the silicon to a suitable precursor and then reduce it gently. It's a very high yielding reaction. Silicon tetrachloride would be one example of a precursor you could use (I think there's a few others - there's a guy in my lab who makes a lot of silicon quantum dots).
The big question is how easy it is to go from silicic acid back to nanoparticles - if it can be done electrochemically and relatively efficiently then what's been discovered is a very efficient catalytic process for cracking hydrogen from water.
It sounds like it's trying to replace Unison.
This is a good goal, because although Unison is one of the best tools out there, it's still limited in a lot of ways (tends to enforce a star topology). I've had an idea banging around in my head for a long while that some type of distributed protocol would be preferable - use a BitTorrent tracker to let computers find each other, then let the most recent copy amongst them to sync (with some conflict resolution logic).
Are "seed factories" even possible with current levels of tech? I thought we needed molecular manufacturing to build credible devices.
The way I see it, currently we lack the "pre-requisite" technology to do practical space exploitation like this. If we had molecular manufacturing, we could mass produce rocket components autonomously in giant automated factories on earth that can self replicate the parts used in themselves. We could build true von neuman probes and spacecraft that could go out and build real seed factories, etc to really do it.
Large space stations with thousands of inhabitants, etc would all be possible.
But step 0 is R&D in developing molecular manufacturing, which requires an enormous research effort. Right now, there's a few scientists poking around with simulations of a method to covalently bond carbon to other carbon on a surface. This should be where all the research dollars go.
You don't. What you need is clever optimization of your tooling - basically finding out the minimal expected life of all your components, so you can launch something which can produce X number of sub-machines before breaking down and needing replacement.
Because you can't read forums or news or blogs on a TV screen at a distance easily, nor navigate them.
I find it hilarious this is at the tail end of a thread with people cacking themselves about being so intelligent.
And yet, I would argue it's an ongoing disaster that a lot of the time we're not really trying to quantify these types of parameters. Nothing is gained if we require everyone to go through the exact same learning exercise, and we never actually dissect the common problems and figure out what causes them.
It's not a problem with the scientific method, it's a problem of communicating results. Clearly it isn't working optimally if this article is correct. If people can only tell each other when something works, but can't discuss when things don't work, then the communication channels are severely broken.
This is actually a huge problem.
Science really needs something like Freenode for different disciplines. A lot of the time you simply want to be able to talk to some of the people dealing with the work in the original group, since they're likely to be able to give you the small details which turn out to matter.
Do you not understand the purpose of peer-review? If results that were peer-reviewed are not reproducible, that is not a failing of the scientific method itself, nor is it a failing of peer review. Peer review does not exist to validate methods as that would be quite nearly an impossible task for the majority of all scientific papers that are published currently unless the journal sent an editor to the lab that submitted said paper to rerun the work themselves - which would be so absurdly expensive that nobody would ever pay to publish. Peer review is intended to make sure that work published is scientifically rigorous and well written.
Many of the published results and methods being verified are ones that have questionable results - such as producing too much output chemicals or reactions don't appear they should work at all. Those are papers for which peer-review has failed to provide adequate review. If the paper was truly read in-depth by other equally qualified scientists these issues would have been noticed and the paper (published or not) would have been called into question.
The caveat to this would be papers that are published with the sole purpose of seeking peer review and inviting other to validate the results, for example many of the cold fusion papers and the experiment which implied neutrinos were traveling faster than light.
I also recognize that peer review happens both before and after publication, and in fact the bloggers are part of the peer-review process.
Also frankly, there's a ton of papers out there which do work but which omit crucial details of how they work. Queue 2 years of my life discovering that someone's "simple robust synthesis" can't possibly have worked the way they said it did, and gradually reverse engineering that they were doing something they didn't report in any papers which had an important effect (they didn't quite seal up the reaction vial, but didn't leave it open, so coupled with water and condensation they were setting up a highly unreliable oxygen headspace control system - rig up a reliable way to fix the mol % and hey, anyone can do it!).
I've very much become convinced that the terse writing style which gets encouraged in a lot of chemistry papers is just not useful at all when it comes to replicating them (and protocol papers are worse - people write still write what they were trying to do, not necessarily what actually gets done more often then not).
Depends on intensity I imagine. The article notes it had to be further then 3000 light years away or they'd have expected it to cause an extinction event - and also that there are "short" and "long" GRBs.
Define "entering" something in a computer context.
Please, what is the appropriate equivalent activity here and how is it going to be any different to any number of otherwise benign network activities.
The rule here is to never sign NDA in this case. Go public and burn the company in question with the media. Threatening people with jail when they discover a exploit in software is counter-active and just plain stupid. The president of Skytech clearly doesn't understand software or computers in general. In fact. I am sure that he is just plain capital asshole as you can find them in companies everywhere.
It feels like a better conclusion is "cover your tracks" no matter how white-hat (and basically harmless) what you're doing is, because the world is full of jerk offs.
Well I suspect principally because a company which builds computer hardware doesn't have a very large bioscience division.
I believe the current theory on laser communication in space is that it could get up to some serious bandwidth at inter-planetary distances - think 100 mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s - but obviously it's not really been tried yet. Curiosity is only sustaining something like 1.5 mbit/s even even with help from the Mars orbiters.
I'm guessing the real benefit of this type of work was getting some actual data on the types of things which affect tracking and receiving lasers in space, even if only at very low bitrates.
Divide by 2 if he's not using local echo though, plus add in latency for the round trip of waiting for your characters to appear.
The idea is that KeePass uses a combination of mouse and keyboard input injection to type the password - most loggers only look at keyboard input, which defeats "trivial" cases - after all, if your system is keylogger compromised you have a much bigger problem anyway.
No, they were labelled "for headache" "for backpain" "for muscle pain" and all contained the same form of pill.
Except you don't know this.
You are using the baseline of drugs which are out there and saying "look at how many are safe!". But you have no comparison of the number of drugs with dangerous, potentially longterm or life-threatening side-effects.
Giving your countless millions induced cancer en masse (or multiple organ failure, or compromised immune systems) would be medical, financial and social disaster. And, most cancer and heart disease drugs simply aren't that efficacious. They're not cures - they're treatments, and a lot of the time they turn out to be no more effective then existing treatments.
Late stage cancer patients may have nothing to lose, but no one has yet produced a legal document which will actually indemnify scientists and doctors against a drug which turns out to very rapidly kill such a patient from litigation by their family - and nor is there a way to create such a thing without opening such people up to potentially widespread mistreatment (since suitably indemnified, you could do pretty much anything and never be sued).
And yet he's not wrong. 5 brands of neurofen, yet they all contain the same amount of ibuprofen.
It does somewhat stand to reason though that any thing which lets us thoroughly reduce blood viral loading might open the way to use other treatments to restore people's immune system as well. It still wouldn't be a total cure, but if we could take someone with AIDS back to just being HIV positive, it would an enormous step.
The trouble is that there *have* been a number of cures/vaccines, but HIV mutates so quickly that they were quickly rendered ineffective. HIV can differ significantly even between somebody and the person they were infected by, all depending on how their immune system responds to the infection and what drugs they are given.
The difference here is that the treatment targets several stages of the HIV "life-cycle". In micribiology targeting a single point of weakness of an organism is relatively quickly circumvented, but targeting many points of weakness has a much more devastating effect.
Well, or just targeting something so core to it that any mutation is enormously deleterious to the organism. It turns out the same type of thing is true for a lot of multi-drug resistant bacteria: placed in competition with normal versions, they end up dying out because synthesizing all the drug resistance proteins is very energy expensive.
With any luck, any form of HIV without this protein is going to be similarly hindered.
Plenty of tumor-like things can just disappear. Your body kills off lot's of cancerous cells every day - "cancer" is the kind of inverse-evolution of those the body misses.
Sort of offtopic but I'm a little disappointed that this unfortunate affliction for this person is being spun as a possible "fountain of eternal youth" in the article. Come on, people. We should be working to better understand this so we can help people
Yeah, it's a bit blatant on that point, but saving the lives of 100,000 people every day wouldn't be helping people? A cure for aging would save more lives than a cure for everything else combined.
It's less a cure for aging, and more "eternal youth". That's generally a good thing though, because the current problem with medical science is that we've simply beaten out the things which kill you when you're young and able-bodied - not prevented the general decline of physical and cognitive function which happens over a longer period. What we'd really like to do is keep people "young" longer - ideally a lot longer, so they can continue looking after themselves.
I doubt it would be as hellish as you make it out to be. I for one would love the opportunity to enjoy a severely long life. Unfortunately I seem to be in the majority here. It's frustrating because so many people seem to think it's such a horrible thing I fear progress is going far too slow to achieve any kind of immortality in my life time.
There's emotional benefit to trying to think it would be a bad thing - because presently it's impossible.
See the number of stories which end with someone deciding they don't want the immortality cure and being happy about that, but then if you simply read about the events of the immortals over just long time spans they live interesting lives. Given that the mean time to a fatality by accident is something like 240 years, and it's not like it would be that big of a change - we have people who live to 100 pretty regularly.
He was offered a deal of about four years. If he and/or his lawyers had been so inclined I'd bet they could have bid that down significantly. So any observation that's talking about decades in jail is skipping over some of the facts.
Are you vaguely familiar with what passes for the American prison system? In 4 years, there's a decent chance he'd have been raped repeatedly and possibly contracted a terminal disease.
Crimes against one's person, and crimes against a nebulous - at best intellectual property concept are and should be treated very differently.
... If we ever figure out how to control the structure of materials so that the strength of individual chemical bonds is preserved in bulk materials, then we would not only have stronger carbon fibers, but we would also have stronger steel.
It is a special case, but we do have well know examples of how to do this. They are crystals, which are atomically ordered on the macroscale. The manifestation of the strength inherent in the carbon-carbon bond on the macroscale is what bestows upon diamonds their remarkable properties. Single crystal macroscopic parts are manufactured in metallurgy also (turbine blades).
We also have bulk commercial applications of it - nickel super-alloys are grown into very large single crystals for use in airplane propellers/turbine fans. There are no grain boundaries - it's just one big crystal.
That said, there's where the people making artificial diamonds are probably really hoping to go: single crystal diamonds grown to custom order shapes.