The substance is not stable when the pressure is released - it immediately decomposes. Carrying around the whole set-up where the typical payload (i.e. the compressed substance) is maybe 0.1% of the total weight of the apparatus is of course impractical. Also, this kind of high-pressure research is not exactly new. There are many published similar experiments where compounds undergo interesting crystal structure changes at ultra-high pressures. Nevertheless, bond strenghts limit what extra energy you can store in crystal structure variants. Xe-F bonds are definitely not among the strongest.
Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
http://www.jurablogs.com/de/wenn-ein-eichenblatt-den-moerder-ueberfuehrt (sorry, no English version, use Google Translation)
In 2004, a killer was convicted in Germany. The corpse of his wife had been found in a forest, buried beneath an oak tree. He claimed he was innocent and that had never even been in that area.
Unfortunately for him, a dried leaf of an oak tree was found in the trunk of his car - and DNA analysis proved it was from the very oak tree the corpse was buried under. Plants have DNA, too.
You are saying you do not check your statements (such as your credit card statement - same principle!) at least once a month?
And yes, direct debit requires authorization by the withdrawer. They need your signature under a contract or invoice, or at least some online transaction record, to obtain authorization. Banks will actually check this, at least if a certain amount is involved and if the withdrawer is not somebody they recognize as generally trustworthy by regular transactions with other customers. A direct debit from an outfit in the Ukraine will not be processed until the withdrawer has provided reasonable proof of authorization. If something goes wrong, it's the bank who will eat the loss if they can't get to the withdrawer - so they have an incentive to be careful, and will prosecute fraud.
You have the right to reclaim within 6 weeks any unauthorized withdrawal from your account (Rueckbuchung). This is handled directly by the bank, with minimal paperwork, no involvement of the company that had done the withdrawal, and no way for the bank to refuse to process the reversal.
Of course a company will contact you, and probably try to charge you extra fees or press for legal action, if the withdrawal was done correctly - but you do not need to fear that anybody could just raid your account.
The code quality of many well-known scientific software packages is abysmal.
In chemistry, you should at least expect that the outcome of descriptor computations on a set of molecules is independent of the order of atoms and bonds in a molecule, and the order of file records.
Well, this is disturbingly often not the case, as we discovered in a recent study.
In an attempt to raise awareness of this problem, we have launched a public Web-accessible computational result verification service (http://www.xemistry.com/cv). A poster explaining this app and some background, including sample test results, can be found at http://www.xemistry.com/Presentations/verifier_panel_2009.pdf.
Unfortunately, the worst application we have encountered so far appears to be a standard tool for adding Wikipedia data for chemicals, systematically poisoning it with incorrect data.
I do not know about this exact database, but many scientific databases are hand-curated and extensively reviewed. Many do not include every measurement published in the literature, but carefully and judiciously select those data points deemed, by expert opinion, most reliable. Thermodynamic databases do not contains "facts" per se, but measured data points which may or may not be close to the facts. The editing and review process, which is quite an investment, does often create a solid foundation for copyright. These databases are not just a routine business, like a reformatted dump of the data from a telephone company.
According to the image in the article, the individual buckyballs are linked by SP3 carbons (@-CH2-Phi-CH2-@) from the solvent. This means, there is no pi electron system, and therefore no electrical connectivity, between the buckyball entities. The physical characteristics of this material are vastly different from nanotubes, which are a single extended pi system. I highly doubt that this stuff can be a replacement for any application which requires long-distance electron flow, such as light harvesting, microelectronics, etc.
Of course this effects still depends on the electronic properties of aluminum. Atoms of the same element in different cluster positions often have markedly different electronic environments and properties - this has been extensively studied for many small cluster systems. And if the relative orientation of suitably partially charged atoms is right, interesting effects can be observed.
And the other comments are right, too: This is absolutely not an energy-effective way to produce hydrogen.
A chalcogenide is a chemical compound consisting of at least one chalcogen ion and at least one more electropositive element. Although all group 16 elements of the periodic table are defined as chalcogens, the term is more commonly reserved for sulfides, selenides, and tellurides, rather than oxides.
There are tons of different chalcogenides, and the arsenic component is not the defining element (here, it is sulphur).
The 1996 Nobel prize was already given for the discovery of Buckyballs. Graphene is the same field (so the general area is already covered), and not really a surprize. It is just a monolayer of graphite. Preparing it and measuring its properties is (highly interesting) engineering, but not groundbreaking science.
Mod parent up. This is the only relevant post so far.
There will be a new law which gives copyright holders the tools to request infringer user data directly from ISPs which are required to store it for some time. Before that, it was not possible to get this data without a criminal warrant due to personal data protection laws, and so an enormous case load resulted for the public prosecutors. They do not want to play along any longer for smaller cases where no criminal trial will ultimately result. Copyright holders are of course still eligible for compensation by infringers by means of a civil suit. This whole process has just been streamlined. That is all. No free passes for anybody.
And do not forget that the US not only penalizes foreign companies, which refuse to follow US boycotts, but also penalizes those which adhere to boycotts not originating from the US:
It has been proven in a really convincing fashion that you can have breathtaking stylishness in an energy-positive (!!, not just zero-energy), 100% recyclable house in moderate climate (Germany):
Year 2001: 5 (five) US citizens die in Anthrax scare. US government immediately starts proceedings for compulsory license for Cipro, wrestling the patent rights away from foreign company and competitor Bayer. This stance is widely praised as proactive and protecting the precious lives of US citizens.
Year 2007: Tens of thousand of people die in Brazil each year from AIDS because they cannot afford patented medication. Action from Brazil to force compulsory licensing is widely denounced as destroying the worldwide pharma industry, especially by US commentators.
It is highly unlikely that any enzyme can be developed into any useful cure for a virus infection, for pharmacokinetics, transport and stability issues alone.
It is not difficult to kill anything. The same amount of bleach would kill reliably 100% of the virus in the test tube.
The problem is to develop a substance which is selective, has acceptable side-effects and actually reaches the target when the virus has embedded itself in the cells, which is not easy.
The GPL is *not* based on international copyright and contract law, but is rather parochially (and dangerously so) modeled on US/British legal views. One key point is the missing distinction between copyright (which cannot be transfered in German law but remains always with the author) and commercial exploitation rights (which can be assigned/sold etc.). The question whether the exact wording of the GPL implies an impossible transfer of copyright which would it make unenforcible in German law, or not is far from obvious, and it may require more court reviews until this is really settled in German law (the legal system does not require other courts to always follow precedence from isolated cases without established legal theory behind it).
I consider the "Christian Democratic Union" and the "Christian Social Union" to be clearly less christianity-centered than the US Democrats, and certainly *much* less than the Republicans. The party name does not tell the whole story. Compared to the US, religion plays a much smaller role in German political life (thank God!;-)
They pay low insurance rates *because* they have less accidents. Insurance companies make no gifts. They do math. Very precise mathon large sample sizes.
If you do not remember the details, and are too lazy to look them up, do not post. The author, David Irwing, is British, and was arrested in *Austria*.
"The study did not say why this phenomenon occurred, but The Sunday Times quoted a specialist in evolutionary psychology as saying it could be because the children of "systemiser" parents appeared to encounter more testosterone in the womb, making their gender more likely to be male."
The gender is determined by the chromosome set when sperm and egg fusion. That has nothing to do with testosterone levels later experienced in the womb.
Slashdot Mirror
The substance is not stable when the pressure is released - it immediately decomposes. Carrying around the whole set-up where the typical payload (i.e. the compressed substance) is maybe 0.1% of the total weight of the apparatus is of course impractical. Also, this kind of high-pressure research is not exactly new. There are many published similar experiments where compounds undergo interesting crystal structure changes at ultra-high pressures. Nevertheless, bond strenghts limit what extra energy you can store in crystal structure variants. Xe-F bonds are definitely not among the strongest.
Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
Suitable paper and ink are hard to come by. You'd probably pay more than $5 for the materials on the black market.
http://www.jurablogs.com/de/wenn-ein-eichenblatt-den-moerder-ueberfuehrt (sorry, no English version, use Google Translation)
In 2004, a killer was convicted in Germany. The corpse of his wife had been found in a forest, buried beneath an oak tree. He claimed he was innocent and that had never even been in that area.
Unfortunately for him, a dried leaf of an oak tree was found in the trunk of his car - and DNA analysis proved it was from the very oak tree the corpse was buried under. Plants have DNA, too.
Oops.
You are saying you do not check your statements (such as your credit card statement - same principle!) at least once a month?
And yes, direct debit requires authorization by the withdrawer. They need your signature under a contract or invoice, or at least some online transaction record, to obtain authorization. Banks will actually check this, at least if a certain amount is involved and if the withdrawer is not somebody they recognize as generally trustworthy by regular transactions with other customers. A direct debit from an outfit in the Ukraine will not be processed until the withdrawer has provided reasonable proof of authorization. If something goes wrong, it's the bank who will eat the loss if they can't get to the withdrawer - so they have an incentive to be careful, and will prosecute fraud.
You have the right to reclaim within 6 weeks any unauthorized withdrawal from your account (Rueckbuchung). This is handled directly by the bank, with minimal paperwork, no involvement of the company that had done the withdrawal, and no way for the bank to refuse to process the reversal.
Of course a company will contact you, and probably try to charge you extra fees or press for legal action, if the withdrawal was done correctly - but you do not need to fear that anybody could just raid your account.
The code quality of many well-known scientific software packages is abysmal.
In chemistry, you should at least expect that the outcome of descriptor computations on a set of molecules is independent of the order of atoms and bonds in a molecule, and the order of file records.
Well, this is disturbingly often not the case, as we discovered in a recent study.
In an attempt to raise awareness of this problem, we have launched a public Web-accessible computational result verification service (http://www.xemistry.com/cv). A poster explaining this app and some background, including sample test results, can be found at http://www.xemistry.com/Presentations/verifier_panel_2009.pdf.
Unfortunately, the worst application we have encountered so far appears to be a standard tool for adding Wikipedia data for chemicals, systematically poisoning it with incorrect data.
I do not know about this exact database, but many scientific databases are hand-curated and extensively reviewed. Many do not include every measurement published in the literature, but carefully and judiciously select those data points deemed, by expert opinion, most reliable. Thermodynamic databases do not contains "facts" per se, but measured data points which may or may not be close to the facts. The editing and review process, which is quite an investment, does often create a solid foundation for copyright. These databases are not just a routine business, like a reformatted dump of the data from a telephone company.
According to the image in the article, the individual buckyballs are linked by SP3 carbons (@-CH2-Phi-CH2-@) from the solvent. This means, there is no pi electron system, and therefore no electrical connectivity, between the buckyball entities. The physical characteristics of this material are vastly different from nanotubes, which are a single extended pi system. I highly doubt that this stuff can be a replacement for any application which requires long-distance electron flow, such as light harvesting, microelectronics, etc.
Of course this effects still depends on the electronic properties of aluminum. Atoms of the same element in different cluster positions often have markedly different electronic environments and properties - this has been extensively studied for many small cluster systems. And if the relative orientation of suitably partially charged atoms is right, interesting effects can be observed.
And the other comments are right, too: This is absolutely not an energy-effective way to produce hydrogen.
This material description is totally misleading.
From Wikipedia:
A chalcogenide is a chemical compound consisting of at least one chalcogen ion and at least one more electropositive element. Although all group 16 elements of the periodic table are defined as chalcogens, the term is more commonly reserved for sulfides, selenides, and tellurides, rather than oxides.
There are tons of different chalcogenides, and the arsenic component is not the defining element (here, it is sulphur).
The 1996 Nobel prize was already given for the discovery of Buckyballs. Graphene is the same field (so the general area is already covered), and not really a surprize. It is just a monolayer of graphite. Preparing it and measuring its properties is (highly interesting) engineering, but not groundbreaking science.
Mod parent up. This is the only relevant post so far.
There will be a new law which gives copyright holders the tools to request infringer user data directly from ISPs which are required to store it for some time. Before that, it was not possible to get this data without a criminal warrant due to personal data protection laws, and so an enormous case load resulted for the public prosecutors. They do not want to play along any longer for smaller cases where no criminal trial will ultimately result. Copyright holders are of course still eligible for compensation by infringers by means of a civil suit. This whole process has just been streamlined. That is all. No free passes for anybody.
Washington Post
Well, at least they have a policy in writing...
And do not forget that the US not only penalizes foreign companies, which refuse to follow US boycotts, but also penalizes those which adhere to boycotts not originating from the US:
http://www.bis.doc.gov/antiboycottcompliance/default.htm
(needless to say, I do not support these non-US boycotts, either...)
It has been proven in a really convincing fashion that you can have breathtaking stylishness in an energy-positive (!!, not just zero-energy), 100% recyclable house in moderate climate (Germany):
c hitecture/Smart-House.asp
http://www.iit.edu/~blipski/R128house.html
http://www.robbreport.com/Articles/Home/Design-Ar
It's even in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_R_128
If you use the right glass panels (triple-glazed with integrated IR control sheets), you can have insulation equalling many, many inches of rock wool.
Of course it helps if you a one of the leading structural engineers in the world to pull this off.
Year 2001: 5 (five) US citizens die in Anthrax scare. US government immediately starts proceedings for compulsory license for Cipro, wrestling the patent rights away from foreign company and competitor Bayer. This stance is widely praised as proactive and protecting the precious lives of US citizens.
Year 2007: Tens of thousand of people die in Brazil each year from AIDS because they cannot afford patented medication. Action from Brazil to force compulsory licensing is widely denounced as destroying the worldwide pharma industry, especially by US commentators.
Well...
Another poster who did not bother read the article, but still feels eminently qualified to post his analysis for thousands of eager readers.
Sigh, this is Slashdot.
The US has one of the youngest populations in the group of countries compared.
Not true. You can patent new applications for known drugs, though this kind of protection is not as solid as a new compound.
Seriously.
It is highly unlikely that any enzyme can be developed into any useful cure for a virus infection, for pharmacokinetics, transport and stability issues alone.
It is not difficult to kill anything. The same amount of bleach would kill reliably 100% of the virus in the test tube.
The problem is to develop a substance which is selective, has acceptable side-effects and actually reaches the target when the virus has embedded itself in the cells, which is not easy.
The GPL is *not* based on international copyright and contract law, but is rather parochially (and dangerously so) modeled on US/British legal views. One key point is the missing distinction between copyright (which cannot be transfered in German law but remains always with the author) and commercial exploitation rights (which can be assigned/sold etc.). The question whether the exact wording of the GPL implies an impossible transfer of copyright which would it make unenforcible in German law, or not is far from obvious, and it may require more court reviews until this is really settled in German law (the legal system does not require other courts to always follow precedence from isolated cases without established legal theory behind it).
I consider the "Christian Democratic Union" and the "Christian Social Union" to be clearly less christianity-centered than the US Democrats, and certainly *much* less than the Republicans. The party name does not tell the whole story. Compared to the US, religion plays a much smaller role in German political life (thank God! ;-)
They pay low insurance rates *because* they have less accidents. Insurance companies make no gifts. They do math. Very precise mathon large sample sizes.
Also have a look at Junghans atomic watches (www.junghans.de).
If you do not remember the details, and are too lazy to look them up, do not post. The author, David Irwing, is British, and was arrested in *Austria*.
The gender is determined by the chromosome set when sperm and egg fusion. That has nothing to do with testosterone levels later experienced in the womb.