They should be using Resiniferatoxin, it's significantly more potent than capsaicin. Of course, that isn't found in peppers...
The only down-side I see is it actually doesn't cause any physical damage except to pain receptors. so anybody who has been hit with RTX poison gas recovers and comes back the next day feeling absolutely no pain. If you use it on someone, you'd better kill them or you've just created a super soldier!
My slightly more informed guess is perhaps because RTX isn't found in peppers.
Just a wild guess though, but I would assume that since there is no RTX in peppers it would prevent them from measuring RTX in peppers.
RTX comes from a leafy Moroccan plant similar to poison-ivy. Capsaicin is the primary TRPV1 antagonist found in peppers (the others found in peppers are nowhere near as potent or plentiful), thus capsaicin is the chemical to measure. Can't use it as a measure if it isn't there. Duh.
I'm no expert on these things (I like my food bland), but it seems to me that the fraction of capsicum is at best a rough measure of hotness.
It varies from plant to plant, but you can get an average that is pretty accurate.
It would make more sense just to give the fraction rather than copying the terminology of an obsolete subjective test, but I guess saying a pepper is 7% capsicum just doesn't sound as kewl as "one million scovilles!"
That would actually be a hell of a lot less useful. For one thing, nobody knows how to equate 1% capsaicin to a relative hotness. What does that mean? It's like temperature - our local temperature is a fraction of sunlight absorbed by the earth, along with a boost caused by atmospheric retention factors (greenhouse effect and clouds). So why don't we say "it's nice out, 85% today"? Or "Man it was hot yesterday, must have been 88%!!" Do you see the problem? That figure is useless, to get the same granularity we have with fahrenheit or celcius we'd be using four decimal places in our percentages - that's not natural. Same thing with peppers. I don't know what "1% capsaicin" means, but I do know how hot a jalepeno is, and I do know that if a jalepeno tops out at 15,000 SHUs, and a habanero tops out at 500,000 SHUs, that a habanero is thus about 30 times hotter than a jalepeno and I definitely don't want to eat one raw.
Also, the test is obsolete, but the unit is not. The test worked to provide a base scale of heat, and it actually gave a pretty good way of differentiating exactly how hot the peppers are compared to each other. It is subjective though, so you can't go back and repeat the test with someone new and expect even similar results.
However, since they had a baseline from the original test, they could quantify the original unit size based on pure capsaicin - all you need is a pepper's SHU base number, and an average figure for the amount of capsaicin in the pepper, and scale the unit accordingly. Thus you get about 15,000,000 SHUs as a maxium with pure capsaicin.
The SHU scale also tells me that this Ghost Pepper is one hell of a hot pepper - % of capsaicin doesn't convey that to me the same way.
Sounds like Scovilles are "universally accepted" only by marketeers and culinary masochists.
I don't exactly see a massive push to market hot peppers - the people who like them search them out, and the SHU is perfect for that. Those who don't wouldn't be swayed by a marketing add.
Besides, hot foods are a rush, a bit masochistic, sure, but a hell of a lot of fun. How else can you have fun while just eating? I said JUST eating, not eating and other activities. I already know how to have that kind of fun.;)
...lead to an.NET version which has been poorly implemented in Java.
Uhhh, what? Did you purposely skip over the C# versions, or are you just blind?
While C# itself isn't open source, it is free as in beer, and software made in C# certainly can be open source. Most people aren't re-writing their compilers just to code an app, and it's available in both Windows and Linux, so I really don't see how your complaint has any merit at all. Unless you're just a.Net hater for fun, which is dumb..Net works great and takes a huge load off the programmer's shoulders.
The physical parts of your computer are hardware, and the non-structural parts are 100% binary. From the magnetic bits on your hard drive to the transistors in the CPU - and all other chips - it's all hardware and it's all binary.
Feet are physical, ergo, feet are hardware. Your brain is hardware. Your neurons and the pulses they send between them, all hardware. Your thoughts, however, are software. See the difference?
Now you don't have to be quite as much of a dumbass.:)
Indeed, without the earth's magnetic field the Sun would be blasting us with a constant supply of nastiness to go along with the life-giving radiation it currently provides.
It is well known that the Earth's core is liquid and made almost entirely of iron. It has been shown that rotating a mass of liquid metal generates a significant magnetic field. It's where Earth's field comes from. Mars also has an iron core, but it is solid all the way through, which explains the lack of a magnetic field.
With no magnetic field Mars gets no filter - it gets the full blast of the Sun's radiation, which pretty much destroys any chance of life at the surface. Without the magnetic field to re-direct some of the Sun's rays, more of Mars's atmosphere also gets launched into space.
They go back to the side-scroller style with a new game - different suits, new mechanics, and new worlds in which to chase down Bowser and Princess Toadstool. It's the same type of game as the old SMB games, but it is definitely not re-hashed anything except the premise.
Probably the funnest part about it is the co-op play. The mechanics are such that you really do need to strategize and cooperate with your partner in order to succed in co-op mode. My roommate and her boyfriend are so bad together, it's hilarious. ^^
I wonder when I hear this, is it going up in smoke into the atmosphere, or really disintegrating... there is a difference, as the smoke could be toxic, and should it get out, contaminate the air, where as disintegrating it, would mean exactly that, no longer exists.
It is converted into a more fissible isotope and consumed - i.e. converted into energy. Ordinarily the reactor takes U238 and produces a small amount really nasty fission products, and large amount less nasty but still problematic actinides. The goal is to take the remaining U238 and turn that into U239 by bombarding it with neutrons, which then almost immediately decays into Pu239 and Pu240. Pu240 is undesirable, but Pu239 actually splits more cleanly than U238, so the Pu239 becomes the fuel now. You limit the Pu240 production as much as possible and continue your reaction.
By doing this, a very large portion of the mass is turned into energy - that is it's gone, poof, nadda, no smoke no nothing. Eventually all you'll have left are the fission products, which are nasty but only have to be dealt with for about 1,000 years instead of hundreds of thousands of years like the actinides (the plutonium and uranium). You also have much less total material to store.
The fission products decay very quickly relative to the actinides - their radiation is a small fraction after about 1,000 years. The actinides, however, can last hundreds of thousands of years.
Storing a small amount of waste for a few thousand years is a much smaller problem than storing a small amount waste for several hundred thousand years. This difference should be obvious, especially given the fact that more radioactive waste is produced every year.
Also, given what the method is (targeted neutron bombardment) I wouldn't be surprised if it worked equally well to turn those longer lived fission products into much shorter lived isotopes. Two birds, one stone. They didn't actually mention the fission products though.
In a nuclear power reactor, the main types of radioactivity are fission products, actinides and activation products. Fission products are the largest amount of radioactivity for the first several hundred years, while actinides are dominant roughly 10^3 to 10^5 years after fuel use.
And:
Pu-239 is normally created in nuclear reactors by transmutation of individual atoms of one of the isotopes of uranium present in the fuel rods. Occasionally, when an atom of U-238 is exposed to neutron radiation, its nucleus will capture a neutron, changing it to U-239. This happens more easily with lower Kinetic Energy (as U-238 fission activation is 6.6MeV). The U-239 then rapidly undergoes two beta decays. After the 238U absorbs a neutron to become 239U it then emits an electron and an anti-neutrino (\bar{\nu}_e) by decay to become Neptunium-239 (239Np) and then emits another electron and anti-neutrino by a second decay to become 239Pu:
And:
Most plutonium is produced in research reactors or plutonium production reactors called breeder reactors because they produce more plutonium than they consume fuel; in principle, such reactors make extremely efficient use of natural uranium. In practice, their construction and operation is sufficiently difficult that they are generally only used to produce plutonium. Breeder reactors are generally (but not always) fast reactors, since fast neutrons are somewhat more efficient at plutonium production.
In other words, hella huge quantities of actinides are produced in fission reactors in addition to the fission products. Since only a small amount of the fuel is actually burned, the majority of the waste is actually some form of actinide. They are primarily five actinides (only one of which is not a radioactive isotope) in particular: uranium 238 initially, which absorbs a neutron to become Uranium 239, which decays almost immediately into Neptunium 239, which decays further into Plutonium 239. The plutonium 239 then occasionally absorbs a neutron to become plutonium 240.
Get it? This happens in all fission reactors that use uranium as fuel, which is all commercial fission reactors. Breeder reactors are simply designed to produce as much plutonium 239 as possible, without producing plutonium 240.
Orders of magnitude less (just like fission converts orders of magnitude less matter to energy than fusion does).
It's just that it's so small, the GP never noticed it.
Seriously, where do people think energy comes from? It's not magic people, if there is no energy now, something must be lost in order to gain the energy. That something is matter.
That's what the term burn is all about, and why it is used in science to describe the matter lost in a chemical combustion reaction as well as a fission/fusion reaction.
It is essentially the exact same thing, just on larger scales.
The containers are perfectly safe, and very well shielded. The GP included the containers in his figures.
Currently, instead of storing them somewhere, these containers sit in the open air, and harm no one. How is that better than being stored under ground somewhere?
Simply put, you can't win by compromising with activists - they will seem to acquiesce but it only lasts until the next time the issue comes up They then push just as hard in spite of the prior compromise, even though the new issue is exactly the same as the old, and you are only proposing to do exactly what you did last time, which they agreed to. Now you are in a worse position to defend your position, since you've already given ground before, and your new position is the compromised position.
The only way to beat them is to tell them to get lost. If you yield, you'll lose.
Slashdot Mirror
I sure hope so, something needs to replace the habenero for serious heat, because the habanero tastes like crap!
They should be using Resiniferatoxin, it's significantly more potent than capsaicin. Of course, that isn't found in peppers...
The only down-side I see is it actually doesn't cause any physical damage except to pain receptors. so anybody who has been hit with RTX poison gas recovers and comes back the next day feeling absolutely no pain. If you use it on someone, you'd better kill them or you've just created a super soldier!
Or the fact that RTX has never been found in a pepper. It comes from a Moroccan plant similar to poison ivy.
My slightly more informed guess is perhaps because RTX isn't found in peppers.
Just a wild guess though, but I would assume that since there is no RTX in peppers it would prevent them from measuring RTX in peppers.
RTX comes from a leafy Moroccan plant similar to poison-ivy. Capsaicin is the primary TRPV1 antagonist found in peppers (the others found in peppers are nowhere near as potent or plentiful), thus capsaicin is the chemical to measure. Can't use it as a measure if it isn't there. Duh.
I'm no expert on these things (I like my food bland), but it seems to me that the fraction of capsicum is at best a rough measure of hotness.
It varies from plant to plant, but you can get an average that is pretty accurate.
It would make more sense just to give the fraction rather than copying the terminology of an obsolete subjective test, but I guess saying a pepper is 7% capsicum just doesn't sound as kewl as "one million scovilles!"
That would actually be a hell of a lot less useful. For one thing, nobody knows how to equate 1% capsaicin to a relative hotness. What does that mean? It's like temperature - our local temperature is a fraction of sunlight absorbed by the earth, along with a boost caused by atmospheric retention factors (greenhouse effect and clouds). So why don't we say "it's nice out, 85% today"? Or "Man it was hot yesterday, must have been 88%!!" Do you see the problem? That figure is useless, to get the same granularity we have with fahrenheit or celcius we'd be using four decimal places in our percentages - that's not natural. Same thing with peppers. I don't know what "1% capsaicin" means, but I do know how hot a jalepeno is, and I do know that if a jalepeno tops out at 15,000 SHUs, and a habanero tops out at 500,000 SHUs, that a habanero is thus about 30 times hotter than a jalepeno and I definitely don't want to eat one raw.
Also, the test is obsolete, but the unit is not. The test worked to provide a base scale of heat, and it actually gave a pretty good way of differentiating exactly how hot the peppers are compared to each other. It is subjective though, so you can't go back and repeat the test with someone new and expect even similar results.
However, since they had a baseline from the original test, they could quantify the original unit size based on pure capsaicin - all you need is a pepper's SHU base number, and an average figure for the amount of capsaicin in the pepper, and scale the unit accordingly. Thus you get about 15,000,000 SHUs as a maxium with pure capsaicin.
The SHU scale also tells me that this Ghost Pepper is one hell of a hot pepper - % of capsaicin doesn't convey that to me the same way.
Sounds like Scovilles are "universally accepted" only by marketeers and culinary masochists.
I don't exactly see a massive push to market hot peppers - the people who like them search them out, and the SHU is perfect for that. Those who don't wouldn't be swayed by a marketing add.
Besides, hot foods are a rush, a bit masochistic, sure, but a hell of a lot of fun. How else can you have fun while just eating? I said JUST eating, not eating and other activities. I already know how to have that kind of fun. ;)
...lead to an .NET version which has been poorly implemented in Java.
Uhhh, what? Did you purposely skip over the C# versions, or are you just blind?
While C# itself isn't open source, it is free as in beer, and software made in C# certainly can be open source. Most people aren't re-writing their compilers just to code an app, and it's available in both Windows and Linux, so I really don't see how your complaint has any merit at all. Unless you're just a .Net hater for fun, which is dumb. .Net works great and takes a huge load off the programmer's shoulders.
What's your problem man?
Software != Binary, software = non-physical. Hardware = physical.
The physical parts of your computer are hardware, and the non-structural parts are 100% binary. From the magnetic bits on your hard drive to the transistors in the CPU - and all other chips - it's all hardware and it's all binary.
Feet are physical, ergo, feet are hardware. Your brain is hardware. Your neurons and the pulses they send between them, all hardware. Your thoughts, however, are software. See the difference?
Now you don't have to be quite as much of a dumbass. :)
No one is going to stop you.
I will, damnit!
Don't you DARE skip an article!
You don't have to actually read it, just make up some asinine comment and throw it in there somewhere, anywhere is fine.
Hey now, anybody who does any Windows administration knows this too.
It's just that Windows is so easy to use most users never need to know the command window is there. ;)
*runs*
Damn, never mind, friggin slashdot made it look like you replied to a reply of the GP.
My bad.
*WWWWOOOOOOOOOOOSHHHH*
GP anthropomorphized the planets, in case you missed it.
Indeed, without the earth's magnetic field the Sun would be blasting us with a constant supply of nastiness to go along with the life-giving radiation it currently provides.
It is well known that the Earth's core is liquid and made almost entirely of iron. It has been shown that rotating a mass of liquid metal generates a significant magnetic field. It's where Earth's field comes from. Mars also has an iron core, but it is solid all the way through, which explains the lack of a magnetic field.
With no magnetic field Mars gets no filter - it gets the full blast of the Sun's radiation, which pretty much destroys any chance of life at the surface. Without the magnetic field to re-direct some of the Sun's rays, more of Mars's atmosphere also gets launched into space.
In other words, you are absolutely correct sir!
You should try Super Mario Brothers Wii.
They go back to the side-scroller style with a new game - different suits, new mechanics, and new worlds in which to chase down Bowser and Princess Toadstool. It's the same type of game as the old SMB games, but it is definitely not re-hashed anything except the premise.
Probably the funnest part about it is the co-op play. The mechanics are such that you really do need to strategize and cooperate with your partner in order to succed in co-op mode. My roommate and her boyfriend are so bad together, it's hilarious. ^^
Wow, who gave you that speech?
I wonder when I hear this, is it going up in smoke into the atmosphere, or really disintegrating...
there is a difference, as the smoke could be toxic, and should it get out, contaminate the air,
where as disintegrating it, would mean exactly that, no longer exists.
It is converted into a more fissible isotope and consumed - i.e. converted into energy. Ordinarily the reactor takes U238 and produces a small amount really nasty fission products, and large amount less nasty but still problematic actinides. The goal is to take the remaining U238 and turn that into U239 by bombarding it with neutrons, which then almost immediately decays into Pu239 and Pu240. Pu240 is undesirable, but Pu239 actually splits more cleanly than U238, so the Pu239 becomes the fuel now. You limit the Pu240 production as much as possible and continue your reaction.
By doing this, a very large portion of the mass is turned into energy - that is it's gone, poof, nadda, no smoke no nothing. Eventually all you'll have left are the fission products, which are nasty but only have to be dealt with for about 1,000 years instead of hundreds of thousands of years like the actinides (the plutonium and uranium). You also have much less total material to store.
Actinides are the problem for long term storage.
The fission products decay very quickly relative to the actinides - their radiation is a small fraction after about 1,000 years. The actinides, however, can last hundreds of thousands of years.
Storing a small amount of waste for a few thousand years is a much smaller problem than storing a small amount waste for several hundred thousand years. This difference should be obvious, especially given the fact that more radioactive waste is produced every year.
Also, given what the method is (targeted neutron bombardment) I wouldn't be surprised if it worked equally well to turn those longer lived fission products into much shorter lived isotopes. Two birds, one stone. They didn't actually mention the fission products though.
From Wikipedia:
Fission products in power reactors
In a nuclear power reactor, the main types of radioactivity are fission products, actinides and activation products. Fission products are the largest amount of radioactivity for the first several hundred years, while actinides are dominant roughly 10^3 to 10^5 years after fuel use.
And:
Pu-239 is normally created in nuclear reactors by transmutation of individual atoms of one of the isotopes of uranium present in the fuel rods. Occasionally, when an atom of U-238 is exposed to neutron radiation, its nucleus will capture a neutron, changing it to U-239. This happens more easily with lower Kinetic Energy (as U-238 fission activation is 6.6MeV). The U-239 then rapidly undergoes two beta decays. After the 238U absorbs a neutron to become 239U it then emits an electron and an anti-neutrino (\bar{\nu}_e) by decay to become Neptunium-239 (239Np) and then emits another electron and anti-neutrino by a second decay to become 239Pu:
And:
Most plutonium is produced in research reactors or plutonium production reactors called breeder reactors because they produce more plutonium than they consume fuel; in principle, such reactors make extremely efficient use of natural uranium. In practice, their construction and operation is sufficiently difficult that they are generally only used to produce plutonium. Breeder reactors are generally (but not always) fast reactors, since fast neutrons are somewhat more efficient at plutonium production.
In other words, hella huge quantities of actinides are produced in fission reactors in addition to the fission products. Since only a small amount of the fuel is actually burned, the majority of the waste is actually some form of actinide. They are primarily five actinides (only one of which is not a radioactive isotope) in particular: uranium 238 initially, which absorbs a neutron to become Uranium 239, which decays almost immediately into Neptunium 239, which decays further into Plutonium 239. The plutonium 239 then occasionally absorbs a neutron to become plutonium 240.
Get it? This happens in all fission reactors that use uranium as fuel, which is all commercial fission reactors. Breeder reactors are simply designed to produce as much plutonium 239 as possible, without producing plutonium 240.
Orders of magnitude less (just like fission converts orders of magnitude less matter to energy than fusion does).
It's just that it's so small, the GP never noticed it.
Seriously, where do people think energy comes from? It's not magic people, if there is no energy now, something must be lost in order to gain the energy. That something is matter.
That's what the term burn is all about, and why it is used in science to describe the matter lost in a chemical combustion reaction as well as a fission/fusion reaction.
It is essentially the exact same thing, just on larger scales.
All Uranium isotopes are actinides (Uranium is an actinide).
Where's the re-writing of physics?
The containers are perfectly safe, and very well shielded. The GP included the containers in his figures.
Currently, instead of storing them somewhere, these containers sit in the open air, and harm no one. How is that better than being stored under ground somewhere?
Geeks are so full of themselves, especially when they think they know what they are talking about but really have no clue.
"Burn" is a scientific term that means either chemcial combustion or the consumption of matter in a fission or fusion reaction.
Seriously, look it up, and get off your high horse, you've been riding it backwards this whole time.
Yup.
Simply put, you can't win by compromising with activists - they will seem to acquiesce but it only lasts until the next time the issue comes up They then push just as hard in spite of the prior compromise, even though the new issue is exactly the same as the old, and you are only proposing to do exactly what you did last time, which they agreed to. Now you are in a worse position to defend your position, since you've already given ground before, and your new position is the compromised position.
The only way to beat them is to tell them to get lost. If you yield, you'll lose.
Warez Hound! Burn Him!
You're also more likely to care about technical details that nobody else gives a shit about.
This negates what should be a more informed opinion, landing you squarely in the realm of another worthless survey.
Actually it allows smaller sensors to work as well as larger sensors, and larger sensors to work better.
It's what you really want (better pictures in a cheap camera), even if you think you want something else (bigger sensors in a cheap camera).