There is nothing in the article (or summary) that mentions alternative fuels. Read the article. There are projects on waste heat conversion to electricity, advanced lubricants, advanced (not alternative) fuel properties, carbon fibre manufacturing and testing, etc. It's all pretty hard-core applied materials stuff.
Did anyone else notice that the submitting UID, coondoggie, is awfully reminiscent of the article's author's name, Michael Cooney?
Re:Experiments performed only on 3 test subjects
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 2
Although there are specific programs for what is called high-risk high-impact research, the bulk of the funding that gets doled out by the NIH (the umbrella organization that includes the National Cancer Institute) is for relatively conservative, somewhat plodding research. In some cases the burden of certainty is so high that the researcher must have essentially already done what they are proposing in a grant application. I'm speaking having successfully competed for both high-risk/high-impact and also traditional research grants from the NIH. If this work had been proposed under a normal R01 mechanism (where the vast majority of the funds are granted) it would not be surprising if the application had not been considered at all, as it could have been viewed as too risky.
It is also entirely possible that their application was not funded by the NCI because the NIH grant evaluation process is rife with random influences and noise in the decision making process despite their best efforts. When the pay lines are down in the single digits (meaning less than 10% of applications get funding) it is extremely difficult to avoid this effect.
Here's the abstract of the paper. Note that the summary forgot to mention that the drug has been tested in normal cell lines as well. Also not mentioned is that all of this testing in live animals (not the cell lines) has been in mice and lots and lots of things go wrong when taking a drug developed in a mouse model to humans. It helps a lot that some of the normal cell lines shown to be unaffected were human.
Currently there are relatively few antiviral therapeutics, and most which do exist are highly pathogen-specific or have other disadvantages. We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. We have created DRACOs and shown that they are nontoxic in 11 mammalian cell types and effective against 15 different viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari and Tacaribe arenaviruses, Guama bunyavirus, and H1N1 influenza. We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza. DRACOs have the potential to be effective therapeutics or prophylactics for numerous clinical and priority viruses, due to the broad-spectrum sensitivity of the dsRNA detection domain, the potent activity of the apoptosis induction domain, and the novel direct linkage between the two which viruses have never encountered.
As some posters suggested, there might be problems with herpes-style infections where the virus has infected nerve cells and gone dormant. The authors did not mention this in the paper as far as I could tell.
PoE doesn't help much when you're connecting wirelessly to the net. That dramatically reduces the number of devices -- in terms of what consumers own and use -- for which PoE would be potentially useful.
Exactly. "Pub" is short for "public house" which explains why they feel like someone's livingroom. That's the whole idea, and part of the culture: rather than sitting in your home alone during the evening, you can pop down to the pub and hang out with your friends in essentially the same atmosphere. Local pubs are one of the things that make travelling through the English countryside such a joy! I used to fly through London a fair bit and often would schedule a long stop-over so that I could pop in to town on one of the express trains and have lunch at a proper pub.
That and there's going to be hectares upon hectares of land that need to be cleared, barracks and sundry support systems for the thousands of construction workers that need to be built along with access roads and materials staging areas. If the weight budget has been finalized, the geological surveys for the foundation and maybe even the excavation can begin.
An office-mate of mine in graduate school had worked on a predictive elevator algorithm that is found in some larger office buildings. It tracks the temporal pattern of elevator calls and tried to optimize empty car direction (up, down) and idle placement, among other things. So, for example, at 9am, the optimal action for an empty car without a pending call is to go to the ground floor since it's highly likely the next call will come from people entering the building to head to their offices. Similarly, at noon, the optimal action is to head to the middle of the building since the next call is more likely to come from someone wanting to head down to go out for lunch. Given a few minutes' worth of thought, I'm sure nearly anyone on Slashdot could come up with some very good ideas on optimizing not only empty direction and idle placement for a single car, but multiple cars as well.
You're missing the point entirely and making baseless accusations.
The point was to try and divine the nature of the announcement. The list of speakers includes the head of the entire observation project, people who were leading the instrument design, and the head of a lab that does nothing but science. Chances are the announcement is going to involve the theme of the hard science lab.
(My lab does both instrument design and basic science. My dissertation had two major sections, the first labelled "Technology" that contained a description of a novel data collection method, and the second labelled "Science" that contained the results from applying said method. Given that I've spent my entire adult life in academia, have been part of large projects, and head my own lab now, I'm pretty certain I understand quite well what's involved, and the relative importance of instrument building and investigation.)
While lab heads are clearly important, and I say this in part with the vested interests of being the head of a lab, the bulk of the non-administrative work on any project is done by graduate students and post-docs. That's why their names come first on publications. Thus, often when there is a big collaborative announcement, the lab heads and lead investigators (read: post-docs or graduate students) all get to bask in the glory. Note that I am not confusing lead investigator with principle investigator (the person who has ultimate responsibility for the project, and is nominally the laboratory head), as you seem to be.
Here's a list of her research interests from that site:
Geomicrobiology of sulfate-reducing microorganisms Biotic and abiotic fractionation of sulfur isotopes in modern and ancient oceans and lakes Influence of wildfire on carbon isotopic excursions during the Cretaceous Fate of complex organic molecules on the surface of Mars
As far as I can tell from that list, Dr. Pratt is the only hard scientist. The others are more involved in managing the program (Meyer) or designing the instruments (Christensen, Dundas, McEwen). Interestingly, there are no post-docs or graduate students listed, and they would have been the lead investigators doing the actual work -- perhaps this is a reaction to the Felisa Wolfe-Simon snafu? I'm not familiar with the field, though, so much of this is speculation from 2 minutes' work with Google. Take it for what it's worth.
Most of us feel pretty strongly that WiFi on planes is not dangerous and that it should be allowed as-is. But since there are some extremely stubborn and inflexible people involved in policy making.
How many of you have done actual impact studies and considered things like out-of-spec transmitters, poorly repaired or perhaps modified wifi cards, etc?
Anecdotes are not data, but I had one particular laptop that, when the wifi was (inadvertently) turned on, prevented any PA announcements on one particular flight. And it was a bone-stock laptop with a bone-stock wifi card. After that discovery, the laptop was quickly retired, taken apart for the limited salvage value, and replaced with a new one.
It may well be that 200 properly functioning wifi transmitters all in close proximity of avionics will not interfere, but that presupposes that all 200 transmitters are working correctly, and for every single flight. It's easy to imagine a malfunctioning wifi card spewing power all over the spectrum, so presupposing that every card that will operate on every flight is correctly functioning is a losing supposition. My Ph.D. research included making recordings in electrically ultra-quiet environments and you would be surprised at the crap that even properly functioning equipment transmits.
It also may well be that 200 properly functioning wifi transmitters will interfere with reception of ground signals by overloading the input amplifiers on on-board radio receivers. Given what I know about radio receivers from my EE degrees, and my research experience, I'd put reasonable odds on that happening.
Science (at least the article encapsulations) has been my bedtime reading for a very long time. It all started when I was a child and my father had personal subscriptions to Science and Scientific American. I still recall the feeling of accomplishment and pride as a kid when I was able to slog through a full research article in Science for the first time. My children are going to benefit from the same exposure, but I'll probably add Nature. And both in print form.
Why print? Because a web site is ephemeral. If you don't know about it, it does not exist. A printed journal is in one's immediate environment persistently and, with luck, will be eventually picked up by any sufficiently curious child.
With court orders and sufficient effort, it is possible to backtrace that to a location. Plausible deniability does not attach because of the ubiquitous security cameras that can narrow down the people using the wifi network for the period of the attack to a very small number.
You need to work much harder than that to achieve full anonymity because of the extensive monitoring of the physical world. Did you take the subway to that open wifi? Even if you paid in cash for a one-time-use transit card, your face was recorded entering and exiting the stations. Did you walk to the subway from your home? Your face was recorded by any of a large number of security cameras making it entirely plausible to exhaustively search for you within a few block radius even without your identity fully known.
The editors (read: Timothy) should AT LEAST have included a link to the previous posting and a quick blurb on why this isn't a dupe. And at best rewritten the hype-filled and intentionally misleading summary.
Relatedly, reader assertation asks, "Can anyone suggest a streaming movie service that has a selection comparable to Netfix and will run on a computer using GNU/Linux?"
Is this a serious question? Does the person asking think that any service with a video library as large as Netflix might somehow have escaped notice? Might not have been in the news like Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, Pandora, and other large streaming services? Might not have been extensively discussed on Slashdot already?
When I was finishing my Bachelor's degree an embarrassingly long time ago now, my parents made more-or-less the same observation, and encouraged me to continue on with my doctoral work.
From my experience with a career in academia, I would say that the expectations of society have not increased, resulting in a more educated populace, but that the requirements for obtaining a bachelor's degree have eased. There are people I interact with on a regular basis that didn't study one whit in college, and yet have a degree without having had unusual brilliance to rely upon to get them through.
Yep. The problem with using separate R, G, and B colored LEDs is that they age differentially and the color balance shifts too much.
You can get triple LED packages with R, G, and B elements, but those aren't used (any more) for producing white light as you would want for backlighting an LCD.
Yes, it's an unfortunately naive question, but the persnickety answer is that the white LEDs that form the backlight internally have phosphors to generate broad-spectrum light.
You are again missing the point. The point is that each journal selects which articles to publish. If Science didn't reject over 70% of its submissions, publishing in that journal wouldn't carry such significance -- and what most people having these arguments conveniently forget is that the majority of rejections for high-profile journals are made at the initial stage of editorial triage. That is the primary value that the journals are providing: the job of filtering out the bad papers for their readership.
Yes, the remainder of the peer-review system is done on a volunteer basis. Yes, often typesetting is done by the authors (personally, I'm happy to do that because I'm better at it than most professional typesetters, and I care more about how my article looks than they ever will). But often, people making the anti-journal arguments forget that there are professional copy editors that enforce correct language and specific written style that adds value. Journals also provide indefinite archival of electronic copies and ready retrieval of same. Many provide the necessary warnings that a given article has been withdrawn or ammended by a follow-on publication or comment (try finding that using just Google Scholar, for example, unless you remember to look for it). Some journals provide peer-reviewed commentary on given articles.
As for funding agencies mandating open access, I'm not sure which rock you have been under, but the NIH has required open access publishing for years now, and the NSF is soon to follow. Those are the two largest funding agencies in the US.
Only if the recording microphone happened to be in exactly the right spot. Otherwise, it's entirely unrelated to the boom. Sonic booms don't happen when aircraft are moving sub-sonically, so without additional information about the exact location of the microphone and careful crafting of its position relative to the aircraft, it's far safer to assume that the aircraft is still flying super-sonic if you hear a boom. To state that it marks the transition from super-sonic to sub-sonic travel is misleading because the only time that will be the case is when the microphones are situated in extraordinary locations that mark the point on the earth where the very last part of the shock wave cone impacts: 0.5 km earlier on the flight path, there will still be a boom, but it will not mark the transition; same is true for 1 km earlier, and 2 km earlier, etc; 0.5 km later on the flight path, there will be no boom.
As far as I understand, when you hear a boom, it does not mark the transition between flight modes, rather, it marks one point along the potentially very long portion of super-sonic flight.
I hear this argument all the time, and it misses the biggest contribution of journals: reputation. In the present time, journals contribute greatly by allowing certain papers to be associated with their name, and disallowing others. I'm not talking just about peer review, but the initial editorial review prior to peer review which, for high-impact journals, is where most of the rejections originate.
When you publish in Nature, for example, you are effectively guaranteed a much bigger audience than publishing in South Saskatchewan Biology (apologies to my Canadian friends for making up a podunk-sounding journal) because historically Nature papers are good, and people understand that. The journal imprimatur under which a paper appears is an estimate of the importance of the paper.
Freely published papers, like appear in some open-access catch-all journals, are essentially worthless to the modern academician because he lacks the time to sift through all the crud. When viewed in this context, high profile journals are providing a valuation service. An important valuation service.
They are indeed very sharp and clear in the video, almost like two gun shots in rapid fire. But my lay understanding about sonic booms, the announcer's narrative notwithstanding, is that they do not accompany the transition from super- to sub-sonic flight, but rather, accompany essentially all super-sonic flight, and exactly when you hear the boom depends on your geometrical relation to the aircraft, its speed, altitude, etc. See the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing in the article (or summary) that mentions alternative fuels. Read the article. There are projects on waste heat conversion to electricity, advanced lubricants, advanced (not alternative) fuel properties, carbon fibre manufacturing and testing, etc. It's all pretty hard-core applied materials stuff.
Did anyone else notice that the submitting UID, coondoggie, is awfully reminiscent of the article's author's name, Michael Cooney?
Although there are specific programs for what is called high-risk high-impact research, the bulk of the funding that gets doled out by the NIH (the umbrella organization that includes the National Cancer Institute) is for relatively conservative, somewhat plodding research. In some cases the burden of certainty is so high that the researcher must have essentially already done what they are proposing in a grant application. I'm speaking having successfully competed for both high-risk/high-impact and also traditional research grants from the NIH. If this work had been proposed under a normal R01 mechanism (where the vast majority of the funds are granted) it would not be surprising if the application had not been considered at all, as it could have been viewed as too risky.
It is also entirely possible that their application was not funded by the NCI because the NIH grant evaluation process is rife with random influences and noise in the decision making process despite their best efforts. When the pay lines are down in the single digits (meaning less than 10% of applications get funding) it is extremely difficult to avoid this effect.
Here's the abstract of the paper. Note that the summary forgot to mention that the drug has been tested in normal cell lines as well. Also not mentioned is that all of this testing in live animals (not the cell lines) has been in mice and lots and lots of things go wrong when taking a drug developed in a mouse model to humans. It helps a lot that some of the normal cell lines shown to be unaffected were human.
Currently there are relatively few antiviral therapeutics, and most which do exist are highly pathogen-specific or have other disadvantages. We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. We have created DRACOs and shown that they are nontoxic in 11 mammalian cell types and effective against 15 different viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari and Tacaribe arenaviruses, Guama bunyavirus, and H1N1 influenza. We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza. DRACOs have the potential to be effective therapeutics or prophylactics for numerous clinical and priority viruses, due to the broad-spectrum sensitivity of the dsRNA detection domain, the potent activity of the apoptosis induction domain, and the novel direct linkage between the two which viruses have never encountered.
As some posters suggested, there might be problems with herpes-style infections where the virus has infected nerve cells and gone dormant. The authors did not mention this in the paper as far as I could tell.
PoE doesn't help much when you're connecting wirelessly to the net. That dramatically reduces the number of devices -- in terms of what consumers own and use -- for which PoE would be potentially useful.
How did this guy afford a plane ticket *anywhere* with a fine that large levied against him?
Exactly. "Pub" is short for "public house" which explains why they feel like someone's livingroom. That's the whole idea, and part of the culture: rather than sitting in your home alone during the evening, you can pop down to the pub and hang out with your friends in essentially the same atmosphere. Local pubs are one of the things that make travelling through the English countryside such a joy! I used to fly through London a fair bit and often would schedule a long stop-over so that I could pop in to town on one of the express trains and have lunch at a proper pub.
That and there's going to be hectares upon hectares of land that need to be cleared, barracks and sundry support systems for the thousands of construction workers that need to be built along with access roads and materials staging areas. If the weight budget has been finalized, the geological surveys for the foundation and maybe even the excavation can begin.
An office-mate of mine in graduate school had worked on a predictive elevator algorithm that is found in some larger office buildings. It tracks the temporal pattern of elevator calls and tried to optimize empty car direction (up, down) and idle placement, among other things. So, for example, at 9am, the optimal action for an empty car without a pending call is to go to the ground floor since it's highly likely the next call will come from people entering the building to head to their offices. Similarly, at noon, the optimal action is to head to the middle of the building since the next call is more likely to come from someone wanting to head down to go out for lunch. Given a few minutes' worth of thought, I'm sure nearly anyone on Slashdot could come up with some very good ideas on optimizing not only empty direction and idle placement for a single car, but multiple cars as well.
You're missing the point entirely and making baseless accusations.
The point was to try and divine the nature of the announcement. The list of speakers includes the head of the entire observation project, people who were leading the instrument design, and the head of a lab that does nothing but science. Chances are the announcement is going to involve the theme of the hard science lab.
(My lab does both instrument design and basic science. My dissertation had two major sections, the first labelled "Technology" that contained a description of a novel data collection method, and the second labelled "Science" that contained the results from applying said method. Given that I've spent my entire adult life in academia, have been part of large projects, and head my own lab now, I'm pretty certain I understand quite well what's involved, and the relative importance of instrument building and investigation.)
While lab heads are clearly important, and I say this in part with the vested interests of being the head of a lab, the bulk of the non-administrative work on any project is done by graduate students and post-docs. That's why their names come first on publications. Thus, often when there is a big collaborative announcement, the lab heads and lead investigators (read: post-docs or graduate students) all get to bask in the glory. Note that I am not confusing lead investigator with principle investigator (the person who has ultimate responsibility for the project, and is nominally the laboratory head), as you seem to be.
Lisa Pratt studies sulfur and specifically biological sulfur with respect to the surface of Mars. Check out her lab's web page:
http://geology.indiana.edu/pratt/
Here's a list of her research interests from that site:
Geomicrobiology of sulfate-reducing microorganisms
Biotic and abiotic fractionation of sulfur isotopes in modern and ancient oceans and lakes
Influence of wildfire on carbon isotopic excursions during the Cretaceous
Fate of complex organic molecules on the surface of Mars
As far as I can tell from that list, Dr. Pratt is the only hard scientist. The others are more involved in managing the program (Meyer) or designing the instruments (Christensen, Dundas, McEwen). Interestingly, there are no post-docs or graduate students listed, and they would have been the lead investigators doing the actual work -- perhaps this is a reaction to the Felisa Wolfe-Simon snafu? I'm not familiar with the field, though, so much of this is speculation from 2 minutes' work with Google. Take it for what it's worth.
Most of us feel pretty strongly that WiFi on planes is not dangerous and that it should be allowed as-is. But since there are some extremely stubborn and inflexible people involved in policy making.
How many of you have done actual impact studies and considered things like out-of-spec transmitters, poorly repaired or perhaps modified wifi cards, etc?
Anecdotes are not data, but I had one particular laptop that, when the wifi was (inadvertently) turned on, prevented any PA announcements on one particular flight. And it was a bone-stock laptop with a bone-stock wifi card. After that discovery, the laptop was quickly retired, taken apart for the limited salvage value, and replaced with a new one.
It may well be that 200 properly functioning wifi transmitters all in close proximity of avionics will not interfere, but that presupposes that all 200 transmitters are working correctly, and for every single flight. It's easy to imagine a malfunctioning wifi card spewing power all over the spectrum, so presupposing that every card that will operate on every flight is correctly functioning is a losing supposition. My Ph.D. research included making recordings in electrically ultra-quiet environments and you would be surprised at the crap that even properly functioning equipment transmits.
It also may well be that 200 properly functioning wifi transmitters will interfere with reception of ground signals by overloading the input amplifiers on on-board radio receivers. Given what I know about radio receivers from my EE degrees, and my research experience, I'd put reasonable odds on that happening.
Science (at least the article encapsulations) has been my bedtime reading for a very long time. It all started when I was a child and my father had personal subscriptions to Science and Scientific American. I still recall the feeling of accomplishment and pride as a kid when I was able to slog through a full research article in Science for the first time. My children are going to benefit from the same exposure, but I'll probably add Nature. And both in print form.
Why print? Because a web site is ephemeral. If you don't know about it, it does not exist. A printed journal is in one's immediate environment persistently and, with luck, will be eventually picked up by any sufficiently curious child.
With court orders and sufficient effort, it is possible to backtrace that to a location. Plausible deniability does not attach because of the ubiquitous security cameras that can narrow down the people using the wifi network for the period of the attack to a very small number.
You need to work much harder than that to achieve full anonymity because of the extensive monitoring of the physical world. Did you take the subway to that open wifi? Even if you paid in cash for a one-time-use transit card, your face was recorded entering and exiting the stations. Did you walk to the subway from your home? Your face was recorded by any of a large number of security cameras making it entirely plausible to exhaustively search for you within a few block radius even without your identity fully known.
The editors (read: Timothy) should AT LEAST have included a link to the previous posting and a quick blurb on why this isn't a dupe. And at best rewritten the hype-filled and intentionally misleading summary.
Another clear failure of Slashdot editing.
Relatedly, reader assertation asks, "Can anyone suggest a streaming movie service that has a selection comparable to Netfix and will run on a computer using GNU/Linux?"
Is this a serious question? Does the person asking think that any service with a video library as large as Netflix might somehow have escaped notice? Might not have been in the news like Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, Pandora, and other large streaming services? Might not have been extensively discussed on Slashdot already?
Really?
When I was finishing my Bachelor's degree an embarrassingly long time ago now, my parents made more-or-less the same observation, and encouraged me to continue on with my doctoral work.
From my experience with a career in academia, I would say that the expectations of society have not increased, resulting in a more educated populace, but that the requirements for obtaining a bachelor's degree have eased. There are people I interact with on a regular basis that didn't study one whit in college, and yet have a degree without having had unusual brilliance to rely upon to get them through.
One of the most insightful posts on Slashdot, ever. Destructive testing -- brilliant! I wish people at NASA were listening.
Never fly through LHR and LGW again without prosthetic forehead in place.
I jest, but more seriously, this news makes me glad that my travel patterns have changed such that I'm no longer flying through London.
Yep. The problem with using separate R, G, and B colored LEDs is that they age differentially and the color balance shifts too much.
You can get triple LED packages with R, G, and B elements, but those aren't used (any more) for producing white light as you would want for backlighting an LCD.
Yes, it's an unfortunately naive question, but the persnickety answer is that the white LEDs that form the backlight internally have phosphors to generate broad-spectrum light.
You are again missing the point. The point is that each journal selects which articles to publish. If Science didn't reject over 70% of its submissions, publishing in that journal wouldn't carry such significance -- and what most people having these arguments conveniently forget is that the majority of rejections for high-profile journals are made at the initial stage of editorial triage. That is the primary value that the journals are providing: the job of filtering out the bad papers for their readership.
Yes, the remainder of the peer-review system is done on a volunteer basis. Yes, often typesetting is done by the authors (personally, I'm happy to do that because I'm better at it than most professional typesetters, and I care more about how my article looks than they ever will). But often, people making the anti-journal arguments forget that there are professional copy editors that enforce correct language and specific written style that adds value. Journals also provide indefinite archival of electronic copies and ready retrieval of same. Many provide the necessary warnings that a given article has been withdrawn or ammended by a follow-on publication or comment (try finding that using just Google Scholar, for example, unless you remember to look for it). Some journals provide peer-reviewed commentary on given articles.
As for funding agencies mandating open access, I'm not sure which rock you have been under, but the NIH has required open access publishing for years now, and the NSF is soon to follow. Those are the two largest funding agencies in the US.
Only if the recording microphone happened to be in exactly the right spot. Otherwise, it's entirely unrelated to the boom. Sonic booms don't happen when aircraft are moving sub-sonically, so without additional information about the exact location of the microphone and careful crafting of its position relative to the aircraft, it's far safer to assume that the aircraft is still flying super-sonic if you hear a boom. To state that it marks the transition from super-sonic to sub-sonic travel is misleading because the only time that will be the case is when the microphones are situated in extraordinary locations that mark the point on the earth where the very last part of the shock wave cone impacts: 0.5 km earlier on the flight path, there will still be a boom, but it will not mark the transition; same is true for 1 km earlier, and 2 km earlier, etc; 0.5 km later on the flight path, there will be no boom.
As far as I understand, when you hear a boom, it does not mark the transition between flight modes, rather, it marks one point along the potentially very long portion of super-sonic flight.
I hear this argument all the time, and it misses the biggest contribution of journals: reputation. In the present time, journals contribute greatly by allowing certain papers to be associated with their name, and disallowing others. I'm not talking just about peer review, but the initial editorial review prior to peer review which, for high-impact journals, is where most of the rejections originate.
When you publish in Nature, for example, you are effectively guaranteed a much bigger audience than publishing in South Saskatchewan Biology (apologies to my Canadian friends for making up a podunk-sounding journal) because historically Nature papers are good, and people understand that. The journal imprimatur under which a paper appears is an estimate of the importance of the paper.
Freely published papers, like appear in some open-access catch-all journals, are essentially worthless to the modern academician because he lacks the time to sift through all the crud. When viewed in this context, high profile journals are providing a valuation service. An important valuation service.
They are indeed very sharp and clear in the video, almost like two gun shots in rapid fire. But my lay understanding about sonic booms, the announcer's narrative notwithstanding, is that they do not accompany the transition from super- to sub-sonic flight, but rather, accompany essentially all super-sonic flight, and exactly when you hear the boom depends on your geometrical relation to the aircraft, its speed, altitude, etc. See the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom
Damn, and I just ran out of mod points. Very insightful comment!