The battery's value comes from its short response on the time scale of milliseconds. Conventional power plants are mechanical systems, and because of that it would take orders of magnitude more time to start them up for backup power generation. For that reason, at all times, coal power plants generate a little bit more power than there's demand for. If some other power plant trips, the frequency drop is detected, and the surplus kinetic energy of the turbine is immediately transmitted to the grid to stabilize the supply. However, there's the cost. The power plant has to generate surplus power at all times just because it can't change its state fast enough in case of emergency. The battery technology, with its response times typical for chemical/solid state systems, slashes the cost of conventional power generation by making this surplus backup power unnecessary.
The article is silent about vectorization, and Intel invests a lot in that lately.
Do we know anything about the compilation flags of that copy of cinebench? If not, the assessment could be extremely unfair. A newer set of vectorization instructions corresponds to a longer vector size for arithmetic operations that can be carried out concurrently. For example, in HPC applications, enabling the highest available level of AVX can lead to 2x gains compared to code compiled for legacy systems.
The claim about low wage misrepresents the reality. "Tesla also offers equity to all employees from the ground up through their stock program." The guy failed to mention that. See https://electrek.co/2017/02/09...
Can anybody explain why creating US jobs is at the absolute top of the agenda? (I'm not trolling.) With the unemployment rate at 4.8%, you won't get any lower. It's the absolute minimum not only according to Fed, but as a result of the universal laws of free market. For example, there's a contribution to the unemployment rate from those who switch from one job to another right at the moment of the measurement. So what's the problem? (My guess: the unemployment is low, but the jobs available for US citizens are shitty.)
Note: I'm an EU citizen; I don't work nor stay in the US.
Well, every word has its origin, and the origin of the word "autopilot" is in the aviation industry. So, really, I can't understand why people began to think "autopilot" is equivalent to something like "robo-pilot" or whatever else they imagine.
The name "autopilot" isn't confusing at all if you think of it as an analogue of the autopilot in a commercial airplane. The airplane autopilot isn't fully autonomic either; for example, it can't take off on its own. Even at the cruising altitude it requires full attention of the pilots: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/26...
Actually, not outer but inner, or core, electrons move at relativistic velocities. Classically described, they are moving in orbits close to the nucleus, so when it has huge positive charge, electric field is strong enough to accelerate movement of negatively charged particles to relativistic speed. Outer electrons aren't affected as much because they feel as if the nucleus had smaller charge simply because it is screened by core electrons.
Light elements, say, those you can find in first three rows of the periodic table, can be qualitatively described using hydrogen atom-like model. Basically, it says that properties of elements are periodic, when you go through the periodic table in a consecutive manner. But then you got heavier elements. The hydrogen atom-like approximation breaks down here, the properties are still periodic, but there are many exceptions from set of simple rules that were valid for lighter elements. In some cases even quantum-mechanical methods fail to describe heavier elements, for example gold wouldn't have gold color if not treated relativistically. One can expect that going towards extremely large Z well established techniques won't prove successful.
Graphene (which is a single sheet graphite in made of) displays somewhat analogous electronic properties. Its electrons travel with speed comparable to to speed of light and act as they've got no effective mass. In particular they can be described by modified Dirac equation, which is relativistic equation for a single particle. Thus, the story is not the only example of formal (mathematical) similarity between physical objects that seem to have absolutely nothing in common. it's the power of mathematical abstraction to see what's essentially similar when your senses say it can't be.
I wonder what is a half-life of such a macromolecule. Not an expert in the field, but during my first biochemistry course I was taught that DNA is only kinetically stable (in contrast with thermodynamic stability), so there is a chance that when making its shape extremely fancy, it becomes useless ephemeral compound. There are also mutations caused by interaction with high-energetic photons (UV light) which constantly appear and are repaired in human cells, but may cause obstacles when there's no natural maintenance system as in cells. This may not be the case because mutations may occur extremely rarely in the timescale of nanomachines activity, but thats what I'm curious about.
(...) That their plan is to just dump the bacteria in local mud and have it generate electricity.
What I tried to point out is that further consideration is needed on whether the environment needs to prepared/sterilized, i.e. made noncompetitive in ecological sense for the bacteria to do their job. It's not naive, it's biotechnology 101.
(...) pass the mud/waste water/etc through the fuel cell to produce electricity.
As it comes to wastewater, it may be good idea, technology for doing that already exists. Mud is dense so mass transport would be extremely energy consuming.
WHAT is halfway down in the article? I don't get it. You've quoted half of the article and what? What should I focus on?
I imagine there may even be filters in place where the waste comes into make sure that any natural predators are weakened or killed to continue allowing the organisms to thrive.
Filtering wastewater is a bit tricky because if you're pushing it through a microporous membrane to get rid of organisms bigger than a diameter of a pore, it requires exercising an extra pressure, so it needs energy. Sterilization through UV light, the same thing. One can imagine getting rid of competing organisms by means of injecting a chemical compound for which our bacteria is resistant, but for others it's toxic. Don't get me wrong, I don't debunk the whole idea, just try to point out they're in the middle (well, maybe further because it's a real breakthrough) of preparing something which is of efficient use in real world.
The information that it'll eventually lead to harnessing energy from mud isn't to be unconditionally believed. First of all, mud isn't habitat for this bacteria (riverbed is). Once in mud, they'll be forced to struggle for life competing with a myriad of other species. Secondly, they're grown in laboratory (the article mentions a kind of induced natural selection being exercised) so they'll be compromised when placed in real-world environment.
License to publish at Nature Publishing Group (publishing house of "Nature" series of journals, really big payer in the field of natural sciences) draws my favorable attention. The point is that the aurhor isn't required to give out the copyright of their published contributions, instead authors grant NPG a license to publish their paper. As it comes to reusing parts of published papers in future work, prior publishers' permission isn't mandatory. This doesn't work in case of review papers, which are commissioned by the publisher, where NPG is granted full copyright.
Does license to publish do any difference? Yes, because six months after publication the author has right to archive the manuscript in a free-access repository, even on NPG's server.
There's one more thing, which however applies only to biological sciences. Since 2008 those papers in Nature which publish organisms' genome for the first time are copyrighted under Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike unported licence.
To conclude, it's worth noting that the academic world is pushing publishers towards less strict publishing policies, thats a big example.
People using this NIST data do it because it has NIST sign on it, so they don't risk being dependent on tabulated values from not exhaustively verified source. If you're rewritting the source code, you should take care to establish means by which users could check that data are unaltered with respect to what NIST servers contain. If you work for renowned institute, that should be easy, just store the database on your server and sync it with NIST, along with sources of data cited at NIST website.
As it comes to Fortran programming, it's optimal language for scientific computing. Modern dialects have some of the power of C (allocatable arrays, long subourtine names, free format code, modules, interoperability with C), but, what is preferable in scientific computing, programmer isn't encouraged to tinker with machine-specific stuff. Many existing codes are written in Fortran, e.g. powerful LAPACK library and many computational chemistry packages, so for many physicists/chemists/engineers Fortran is the only language they know and care of. Moreover, Fortran in recent years has gained parallel-programming functionality thanks to OpenMP (it's provided with features eqivalent to that in C/Cpp).
The vast upshot of this, is that it helps weed out those websites that are cheating the system, and trying to get their website as the #1 google hit, so they can show you ads. So the large part of what they are doing is tracking spam websites, not real ones.
Actually, it calls for further explanation, because manual tweaking of results produces bias and legal concerns. As guy from Google said,
We don't use any of the data we gather in that way. I mean, it is conceivable you could. But the evaluation site ratings that we gather never directly affect the search results that we return. We never go back and say, 'Oh, we learned from a rater that this result isnâ(TM)t as good as that one, so letâ(TM)s put them in a different order.' Doing something like that would skew the whole evaluation by-and-large. So we never touch it.
Mankind's knowledge stands on the shoulders of Google, so they can't just hire, say, a thousand students and use this evaluation as an significant weighting factor. It's rather a evaluation of algorithms for the sake of further improvement done fully by algorithms.
I'm sorrowful. Sorrowful because of earlier comments. Is it really big achievement to read short paper and then write review of "Brief Report"?
Actually./ readers don't know each other so nobody gives a shit about other user's personal feelings unless they're expressed in an amusing way. Try to comment on the very gist of discussion and not on the people unless you want to be on the fast track to flamewarz.
The idea is old and everybody who read paper cited in the story knows that, but here reprogramming is epigenetically-triggered, i.e., there's transduction of proteins, not genetic material by viral vectors.
We are commenting on brief review because of it's briefness. Remember that you have only ~20 minutes for writing significant contribution, after then your post will be placed in the tail of the discussion, chances for never being moderated. Thus, comprehensive posts can be written if someone's already expert in the field, no time for quick literature search.
I suppose that questions about possible mechanism come from ignorance and laziness. Partially answer can be found here:http://images.cell.com/images/Edimages/Cell/IEPs/3661.pdf
Claims that protocols developed by the authors were suboptimal were based on fact, that they were acting blindfolded -- temporal pattern for exposition of the cells on this permeable protein was set by trial and error, so by no means was the transport of proteins into the cells designed in rational way.
The best mixture we get (if our criterion is simplicity of mixture), when we find proteins in bijection relation with DNA vectors.
As is stated in one of the publications you gave link to, the set of four proteins is sufficient and in sense of search procedure involved, minimal. Moreover, if you consider the mechanism of fibroblast->hPS transformation by use of the four delivered proteins, you've probably got bijection between biological function (transcription factor, histone acetylation/methylation pattern modification) and proteins delivered.
The whole idea is pretty simple: just delivering four key reprogramming proteins using shuttle of cell-penetrating peptide. Basing on experience of everyday life we may suppose that a simple solution is free of interference from large number of unknown factors, thus efficient. But that's not the case, the protocol developed by the authors leads to transformation of mere 0.001% of input cells, which is order of magnitude less than in protocols based on viral transfection, and perhaps orders of magnitude less than threshold for applications in medicine. Some improvement could be gained, however, if purified proteins were used. Moreover, this fibroblasts were used to some extent as "blackboxes" with transformation-inducing proteins provided and results checked out, but with no developed sense of what's going on inside, which constitute room another room for improvement.
Christian school of thought is based on stories described in Bible but it's not reducible to this set of facts as can be inferred from what you've said. Over the ages there were philosophical disputes on every little passage of Bible, it's grown up to a consistent system of views on physical world, ethics etc. What you describe as "wacky shit" was in part embraced by regulators creating secular legislature and writers making poems. It rooted deeply into consciousness of a man of western world. Moreover, if someones is embracing Christianity, it's an act of that one's free will. It's not the case with Scientology. This Church has little if any (well, there is that actor...) impact on our culture. But that's not illegal. The bad thing is that Church of Scientology is trying to control free will of it's participants in order to make financial profit.
If you follow link to ACS publication, there you can find "supporting info". In this section, which can be accessed for free, you can watch footage from transmission electron microscopy camera with iron nanoparticle moving back and forth. This is the most important thing. In this paper, there are only technical details, i.e. synthesis of nanotubes and hypotheses about electron transport inside nanotube. $30+ is price when buying single paper, if you are member of academia, your university provides you access for free.
It isn't probable many scientists would believe in things read in such journals. They have few impact factor points if any, aren't listed in Master Journal List, and aren't indexed in PubMed database. Thus, scientific community have means to prevent unfair publisher activity.
I've done a little research using Scholar (Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2458 - 2461 (2000)) and it seems that basic facts about Rydberg molecules are: 1) These are molecules made of two atoms of the same kind, enormously separated (minima of potential curves for example at about 1500 atomic units); 2) Because of extremly shallow minima of energy curve in witch they exist, they are unstable, so must be ultra cold; 3) This Rb_2 molecule despite being homonuclear, displays large dipole moment, which is unusual but predicted by theory. The experiment with rubidium described here proves that approximate quantum theory (I bet that existence of this molecule was predicted using Born-Oppenheimer approximation) is capable of describing effects subtle as this one (existence of Rb_2 Rydberg molecule is subtle one). I'm not an expert in relativistic effects, but it seems to me that this example of extremely distant separation of atoms in molecule could call for relativistic treatment: one Rb atom doesn't know of the other at once, because the information about the movement of the other can't travel faster than light. This effect may be big because of separation of these two atoms.
From fundamental principles: 1) The principle of relativity, 2) Homogeneity of space and time one can derive that Galilean and Einsteinian (special relativity) theories are the only embodiments of the principle of relativity. (http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0302045) But we know that Galilean transformation is gross approximation compared to special relativity. There's more truth in the latter. There must be this limit because of more fundamental laws.
Slashdot Mirror
The battery's value comes from its short response on the time scale of milliseconds. Conventional power plants are mechanical systems, and because of that it would take orders of magnitude more time to start them up for backup power generation. For that reason, at all times, coal power plants generate a little bit more power than there's demand for. If some other power plant trips, the frequency drop is detected, and the surplus kinetic energy of the turbine is immediately transmitted to the grid to stabilize the supply. However, there's the cost. The power plant has to generate surplus power at all times just because it can't change its state fast enough in case of emergency. The battery technology, with its response times typical for chemical/solid state systems, slashes the cost of conventional power generation by making this surplus backup power unnecessary.
The article is silent about vectorization, and Intel invests a lot in that lately. Do we know anything about the compilation flags of that copy of cinebench? If not, the assessment could be extremely unfair. A newer set of vectorization instructions corresponds to a longer vector size for arithmetic operations that can be carried out concurrently. For example, in HPC applications, enabling the highest available level of AVX can lead to 2x gains compared to code compiled for legacy systems.
Probably that's how it's done by Google. You just described the training stage of generative adversarial networks.
The claim about low wage misrepresents the reality. "Tesla also offers equity to all employees from the ground up through their stock program." The guy failed to mention that. See https://electrek.co/2017/02/09...
Can anybody explain why creating US jobs is at the absolute top of the agenda? (I'm not trolling.) With the unemployment rate at 4.8%, you won't get any lower. It's the absolute minimum not only according to Fed, but as a result of the universal laws of free market. For example, there's a contribution to the unemployment rate from those who switch from one job to another right at the moment of the measurement. So what's the problem? (My guess: the unemployment is low, but the jobs available for US citizens are shitty.) Note: I'm an EU citizen; I don't work nor stay in the US.
Well, every word has its origin, and the origin of the word "autopilot" is in the aviation industry. So, really, I can't understand why people began to think "autopilot" is equivalent to something like "robo-pilot" or whatever else they imagine.
The name "autopilot" isn't confusing at all if you think of it as an analogue of the autopilot in a commercial airplane. The airplane autopilot isn't fully autonomic either; for example, it can't take off on its own. Even at the cruising altitude it requires full attention of the pilots: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/26...
Actually, not outer but inner, or core, electrons move at relativistic velocities. Classically described, they are moving in orbits close to the nucleus, so when it has huge positive charge, electric field is strong enough to accelerate movement of negatively charged particles to relativistic speed. Outer electrons aren't affected as much because they feel as if the nucleus had smaller charge simply because it is screened by core electrons.
Light elements, say, those you can find in first three rows of the periodic table, can be qualitatively described using hydrogen atom-like model. Basically, it says that properties of elements are periodic, when you go through the periodic table in a consecutive manner. But then you got heavier elements. The hydrogen atom-like approximation breaks down here, the properties are still periodic, but there are many exceptions from set of simple rules that were valid for lighter elements. In some cases even quantum-mechanical methods fail to describe heavier elements, for example gold wouldn't have gold color if not treated relativistically. One can expect that going towards extremely large Z well established techniques won't prove successful.
Graphene (which is a single sheet graphite in made of) displays somewhat analogous electronic properties. Its electrons travel with speed comparable to to speed of light and act as they've got no effective mass. In particular they can be described by modified Dirac equation, which is relativistic equation for a single particle. Thus, the story is not the only example of formal (mathematical) similarity between physical objects that seem to have absolutely nothing in common. it's the power of mathematical abstraction to see what's essentially similar when your senses say it can't be.
I wonder what is a half-life of such a macromolecule. Not an expert in the field, but during my first biochemistry course I was taught that DNA is only kinetically stable (in contrast with thermodynamic stability), so there is a chance that when making its shape extremely fancy, it becomes useless ephemeral compound. There are also mutations caused by interaction with high-energetic photons (UV light) which constantly appear and are repaired in human cells, but may cause obstacles when there's no natural maintenance system as in cells. This may not be the case because mutations may occur extremely rarely in the timescale of nanomachines activity, but thats what I'm curious about.
(...) That their plan is to just dump the bacteria in local mud and have it generate electricity.
What I tried to point out is that further consideration is needed on whether the environment needs to prepared/sterilized, i.e. made noncompetitive in ecological sense for the bacteria to do their job. It's not naive, it's biotechnology 101.
(...) pass the mud/waste water/etc through the fuel cell to produce electricity.
As it comes to wastewater, it may be good idea, technology for doing that already exists. Mud is dense so mass transport would be extremely energy consuming.
That's halfway down in the article
WHAT is halfway down in the article? I don't get it. You've quoted half of the article and what? What should I focus on?
I imagine there may even be filters in place where the waste comes into make sure that any natural predators are weakened or killed to continue allowing the organisms to thrive.
Filtering wastewater is a bit tricky because if you're pushing it through a microporous membrane to get rid of organisms bigger than a diameter of a pore, it requires exercising an extra pressure, so it needs energy. Sterilization through UV light, the same thing. One can imagine getting rid of competing organisms by means of injecting a chemical compound for which our bacteria is resistant, but for others it's toxic. Don't get me wrong, I don't debunk the whole idea, just try to point out they're in the middle (well, maybe further because it's a real breakthrough) of preparing something which is of efficient use in real world.
The information that it'll eventually lead to harnessing energy from mud isn't to be unconditionally believed. First of all, mud isn't habitat for this bacteria (riverbed is). Once in mud, they'll be forced to struggle for life competing with a myriad of other species. Secondly, they're grown in laboratory (the article mentions a kind of induced natural selection being exercised) so they'll be compromised when placed in real-world environment.
License to publish at Nature Publishing Group (publishing house of "Nature" series of journals, really big payer in the field of natural sciences) draws my favorable attention. The point is that the aurhor isn't required to give out the copyright of their published contributions, instead authors grant NPG a license to publish their paper. As it comes to reusing parts of published papers in future work, prior publishers' permission isn't mandatory. This doesn't work in case of review papers, which are commissioned by the publisher, where NPG is granted full copyright.
Does license to publish do any difference? Yes, because six months after publication the author has right to archive the manuscript in a free-access repository, even on NPG's server.
There's one more thing, which however applies only to biological sciences. Since 2008 those papers in Nature which publish organisms' genome for the first time are copyrighted under Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike unported licence.
To conclude, it's worth noting that the academic world is pushing publishers towards less strict publishing policies, thats a big example.
People using this NIST data do it because it has NIST sign on it, so they don't risk being dependent on tabulated values from not exhaustively verified source. If you're rewritting the source code, you should take care to establish means by which users could check that data are unaltered with respect to what NIST servers contain. If you work for renowned institute, that should be easy, just store the database on your server and sync it with NIST, along with sources of data cited at NIST website.
As it comes to Fortran programming, it's optimal language for scientific computing. Modern dialects have some of the power of C (allocatable arrays, long subourtine names, free format code, modules, interoperability with C), but, what is preferable in scientific computing, programmer isn't encouraged to tinker with machine-specific stuff. Many existing codes are written in Fortran, e.g. powerful LAPACK library and many computational chemistry packages, so for many physicists/chemists/engineers Fortran is the only language they know and care of. Moreover, Fortran in recent years has gained parallel-programming functionality thanks to OpenMP (it's provided with features eqivalent to that in C/Cpp).
The vast upshot of this, is that it helps weed out those websites that are cheating the system, and trying to get their website as the #1 google hit, so they can show you ads. So the large part of what they are doing is tracking spam websites, not real ones.
Actually, it calls for further explanation, because manual tweaking of results produces bias and legal concerns. As guy from Google said,
We don't use any of the data we gather in that way. I mean, it is conceivable you could. But the evaluation site ratings that we gather never directly affect the search results that we return. We never go back and say, 'Oh, we learned from a rater that this result isnâ(TM)t as good as that one, so letâ(TM)s put them in a different order.' Doing something like that would skew the whole evaluation by-and-large. So we never touch it.
Mankind's knowledge stands on the shoulders of Google, so they can't just hire, say, a thousand students and use this evaluation as an significant weighting factor. It's rather a evaluation of algorithms for the sake of further improvement done fully by algorithms.
I'm sorrowful. Sorrowful because of earlier comments. Is it really big achievement to read short paper and then write review of "Brief Report"?
Actually ./ readers don't know each other so nobody gives a shit about other user's personal feelings unless they're expressed in an amusing way. Try to comment on the very gist of discussion and not on the people unless you want to be on the fast track to flamewarz.
he idea is quite old. Thomson et.al. described this idea in this paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5858/1917 [sciencemag.org] . There are earlier, but this one is good one and representative too.
The idea is old and everybody who read paper cited in the story knows that, but here reprogramming is epigenetically-triggered, i.e., there's transduction of proteins, not genetic material by viral vectors.
We are commenting on brief review because of it's briefness. Remember that you have only ~20 minutes for writing significant contribution, after then your post will be placed in the tail of the discussion, chances for never being moderated. Thus, comprehensive posts can be written if someone's already expert in the field, no time for quick literature search.
I suppose that questions about possible mechanism come from ignorance and laziness. Partially answer can be found here :http://images.cell.com/images/Edimages/Cell/IEPs/3661.pdf
Claims that protocols developed by the authors were suboptimal were based on fact, that they were acting blindfolded -- temporal pattern for exposition of the cells on this permeable protein was set by trial and error, so by no means was the transport of proteins into the cells designed in rational way.
The best mixture we get (if our criterion is simplicity of mixture), when we find proteins in bijection relation with DNA vectors.
As is stated in one of the publications you gave link to, the set of four proteins is sufficient and in sense of search procedure involved, minimal. Moreover, if you consider the mechanism of fibroblast->hPS transformation by use of the four delivered proteins, you've probably got bijection between biological function (transcription factor, histone acetylation/methylation pattern modification) and proteins delivered.
The whole idea is pretty simple: just delivering four key reprogramming proteins using shuttle of cell-penetrating peptide. Basing on experience of everyday life we may suppose that a simple solution is free of interference from large number of unknown factors, thus efficient. But that's not the case, the protocol developed by the authors leads to transformation of mere 0.001% of input cells, which is order of magnitude less than in protocols based on viral transfection, and perhaps orders of magnitude less than threshold for applications in medicine. Some improvement could be gained, however, if purified proteins were used. Moreover, this fibroblasts were used to some extent as "blackboxes" with transformation-inducing proteins provided and results checked out, but with no developed sense of what's going on inside, which constitute room another room for improvement.
Maybe you also want imprison all people that have opinions different from yours?
Christian school of thought is based on stories described in Bible but it's not reducible to this set of facts as can be inferred from what you've said. Over the ages there were philosophical disputes on every little passage of Bible, it's grown up to a consistent system of views on physical world, ethics etc. What you describe as "wacky shit" was in part embraced by regulators creating secular legislature and writers making poems. It rooted deeply into consciousness of a man of western world. Moreover, if someones is embracing Christianity, it's an act of that one's free will. It's not the case with Scientology. This Church has little if any (well, there is that actor ...) impact on our culture. But that's not illegal. The bad thing is that Church of Scientology is trying to control free will of it's participants in order to make financial profit.
If you follow link to ACS publication, there you can find "supporting info". In this section, which can be accessed for free, you can watch footage from transmission electron microscopy camera with iron nanoparticle moving back and forth. This is the most important thing. In this paper, there are only technical details, i.e. synthesis of nanotubes and hypotheses about electron transport inside nanotube. $30+ is price when buying single paper, if you are member of academia, your university provides you access for free.
It isn't probable many scientists would believe in things read in such journals. They have few impact factor points if any, aren't listed in Master Journal List, and aren't indexed in PubMed database. Thus, scientific community have means to prevent unfair publisher activity.
I've done a little research using Scholar (Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2458 - 2461 (2000)) and it seems that basic facts about Rydberg molecules are: 1) These are molecules made of two atoms of the same kind, enormously separated (minima of potential curves for example at about 1500 atomic units); 2) Because of extremly shallow minima of energy curve in witch they exist, they are unstable, so must be ultra cold; 3) This Rb_2 molecule despite being homonuclear, displays large dipole moment, which is unusual but predicted by theory. The experiment with rubidium described here proves that approximate quantum theory (I bet that existence of this molecule was predicted using Born-Oppenheimer approximation) is capable of describing effects subtle as this one (existence of Rb_2 Rydberg molecule is subtle one). I'm not an expert in relativistic effects, but it seems to me that this example of extremely distant separation of atoms in molecule could call for relativistic treatment: one Rb atom doesn't know of the other at once, because the information about the movement of the other can't travel faster than light. This effect may be big because of separation of these two atoms.
From fundamental principles: 1) The principle of relativity, 2) Homogeneity of space and time one can derive that Galilean and Einsteinian (special relativity) theories are the only embodiments of the principle of relativity. (http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0302045) But we know that Galilean transformation is gross approximation compared to special relativity. There's more truth in the latter. There must be this limit because of more fundamental laws.