...that the reported effect is real (the sample size of the experiment was ridiculously small), it would be interesting to see if the reverse situation would have a similarly involuntary and detectable effect in males. Also it might be interesting to do a double blind test to examine any biological origin of homosexuality since the presence or absence of sweat in a sample would be (consciously) undetectable(or presumably easily masked judging by the article) by the subject.
throw cold water on this super-laser weapon high-technology circlejerk, but has anyone considered the environmental impact of operating a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser directly in the stratosphere? The whole Ozone layer destruction debate that's taken place over the last 20 years has centered around Chloroflourocarbons(CFC's). It is specifically the Chlorine that forms compounds in the upper atmosphere and subsequently destroys large quantities of Ozone. Other compounds containing Bromine(one halogen down on the periodic table) such as Halon systems used to supress fires in large computer systems is tens if not hundreds of times more destructive to the Ozone layer than Chlorine. One more hop down the table is Iodine, I can't find much information on the destructiveness of Iodine but considering the trend of higher destructive power as the halogen electronegativity gets lower it would be even more dangerous. Considering that the Iodine is being vaporized and dumped DIRECTLY INTO THE OZONE LAYER, I think this issue warrants at least a second look.
Sanyo thinks its oled's will be ready for production in a year. Here is their prototype 15 inch oled display made with >a href=http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/display/sanyo Flat.jhtml>Kodak's technology.
Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post I guess. The E-H (ie. light emitting) recombination layer will be inorganic CdSe quantum dots but the charge transport layers will be organic semiconductors.
"IIRC one of the biggest advantages of stippling in rendering surfaces is that you can get a fast simulation of transparency."
Of course, IANADoctor, but I would imagine that this technique would also be very useful in so called "4D" ultrasound systems. Increasing the speed of rendered frames with transparency would allow visualization of fast motion such as heart valves in 3 dimentions and real time. I don't think this is possible with any method except ultrasound (spin relaxation times make MRI unfeasable and CT's have to image serially with individual slices by moving the patient).
Incidentally, in my opinion, I don't think there many examples as perfect as this technology is of the Arthur C. Clarke quote of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Think about it, if you were a person living just 200 years ago what would you think of a device that when touched to someone's body, allowed you to see what was happening inside live on a screen?
"And they have, essentially, reproduced out of control."
what's "control"? They obey the same laws of physics and chemistry as every other organism on the planet and through millions of years of adaptation they exist in balance with those other organisms, consumning and being consumed by them.
Why can't I consider bacteria "Nanites"?
Re:It doesn't take half a brain to see this.
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"We can't 'eat' air and dirt and use it (and it alone) to grow and reproduce. Nanites could, in theory, do just that, by using raw materials in the air and the earth to reproduce. "
NO, neither could "Nanites"; simply being super tiny dosen't confer upon you the ability to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics! The amount of negative entropy available in any such reaction from eating air and dirt would be so miniscule as to prevent the Nanite from reproducing uncontrollably. Just like THESE bacteria that acually DO subsist on air nd dirt alone(nearly).
The parent post's point still stands, as I see it.
"Communications won't collapse--most long-haul lines are based around fibre now, which is essentially impervious to solar radiation."
It does not matter that the information itself is carried on light inside of fibers of glass. The signals inside the fiber can only travel ~100Km at the most before they need to be boosted again by an amplifier. This is done by doping a small section of the fiber with Erbium atoms and esentially making it lase(stimulated emission) by irradiating it with intense light from semiconductor lasers. There are common CONDUCTIVE cables cladding the main fiber line in a fiber optic cable that supply the amplifiers that are spread out all along the line with power to run. What happenes when huge lengths of conductive cable are immersed in a (potentially quickly) changing magnetic field? Thats right, gigantic currents are set up in the cable and can destroy any sensitive devices connected to it. Thereby rendering the fiber dark.
Hubble's CCD's will NOT be fried by the intensity of light from the moon. This has got to be the most common misconception about Hubble. A 2 second search for "Hubble + Moon" gives you THIS as the very first result!!!
well... seeing as how you've helped pilot interSTELLAR spacecraft I think the LEAST you could do is give us a hand with our puny "space station" at earth's L1 point. I mean, jeez!
It seems strange to me that the reason the planets were found not to exist is because the sunspots on the surface of the star somehow masqueraded as doppler shifts, thereby creating the illusion that a doppler spectroscopy observation had found a planet. This is the scenario that both news sources allude to. It seems much more likely that the giant sunspot would fool an astronomer using the so called transit photometry method of planet detection, whereby the transit of a planet in front of the stars disk dimms it slightly, having the same effect that a large sunspot would as it traverses the rotating stars viewable surface. Can anyone who knows more about this story explain what really happened?
Hands up if you think watching the scientific method in action is cool. This is how science actually works, a claim is made/published it's peer reviewed and the stage of experimental replication attempts is begun; if they prove negative, as they have been, the original claim is thrown out. Science and it's self-correcting nature is the most powerful tool we have to discover the nature of the universe. Just because you don't understand how it works dosn't mean your smug musings are "insightful".
buuuut.....the article was critical of the whole crop circle/ created by aliens phenomenon. It certainly wasn't an endorsment of that waste of film Signs. It makes me NOT want to see it.
The latest issue of Scientific has an enligtening short article on the fine mischief of crop circles. (no doubt released in a timely manner in an effort to counter some of the nonsense from the release of the movie Signs.)
Don't forget, the most important thing about NIF is that it will IGNITE IT'S PLASMA!! It will be the fist fusion experiment in the laboratory to achieve ignition. That is to say, the heat produced by the helium nuclei from the fusion of Deuterium and Tritium in the fuel capsule will be sufficient to continue powering the complete burn of the capsule without additional external power input.
"Could they build units that grabbed inductive power from a transmitter in your glasses to overcome that problem, or maybe even allow super night vision?"
I bet these people in the trial already have a form of "night vision" from their implant. The human eye's response to light cuts off at ~700nm; most photosensitive electronics extend well past that. All you'd need to do is buy one of these and plug it in!
Interestingly..
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It wasn't mentioned in the Chandra release or the CNN spot, but RX J1856.5-3754 is apparently the closest known neutron star. The Chandra site states it's distance at ~400 lyr and the APOD site cites 180 lyr, practically in our back yard!(in cosmological distances anyway)
Yes, I hear that the engineers down in the kinetoscope development room, have obtained a copy for "testing" purposes. Word has it that Mme. Irwin shows her ankles!!
Interestingly (to me anyway), the technology that would be required to make this sort of analysis possible and still fit in to the size of a toilet while being cheap enough to sell for common use was just invented two months ago. The complex kinds of analysis(more than just glucose measurements) they are hoping to eventually do with these things(cancer detection etc.) is going to require looking at the presence and concentration of complex biomolecules, which presumably they'd use and FTIR setup to do. The new "Quantum-Cascade" lasers are the only ones to offer the small, solid state, tunable, mid-infrared, coherent, broadband lightsource you would need for the spectroscopy instrument.
1)Liberally pepper your post with oversimplified pseudoscientific pablum such as "...And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl" thereby craftily distracting your audience's attention away from any actual facts about the true magnitude of the disaster. For instance that annoying little statistic of Thyroid cancer(yes I did specifically pick a site from the WHO as a jab at your laughably out of context quote) incidence increasing by oh, 10 times or so. Or maybe the statement by the Board on Effects of Ionizing Radiation and the International Commission on Radiation Protection that the collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts released from Chernobyl to the population of the USSR would correspond to 24,000 additional deaths(from the Federation of American Scientists) in that area?
2)Proclaim your unquestioned infinite knowledge on all things related to the topic at hand: "In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there." Phew good thing we have people like you to tell us such important things lest we waste millions paying doctors of geology to try to figure out such things.
3)Regurgitate amateurish propaganda supporting your cause which contains self-parodying scare tactics aimed at any opposing viewpoints: "Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!!". It's important to remember that while using this shoe-in of a tactic to attain your +5 that you should ignore all obvious holes in your strawman theory such as the fact that coal has BACKGROUND levels of radiation, and burning it has negligible effect on concentrating this radiation. By Spike hay's logic I could argue that the millions of human bodies incinerated every year in cremation ceremonies increases the radioactive pollution of the atmosphere and soil because of all that Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 released when your body burns. Why it must be thousands of tones total every year!!
4)Finally if all else fails, just make a link like he does to to the nearest nut job you can find whose home page should have the latest instructions on "How to Find Osama bin Laden with guaranteed anonymity" apparently using some whacked out pin number conspiracy theory or some such scheme.
That's all! Your're on your way to karma whore heaven! (p.s. i'm already at 50 so I don't really give a crap about what happens to this post)
Slashdot Mirror
...that the reported effect is real (the sample size of the experiment was ridiculously small), it would be interesting to see if the reverse situation would have a similarly involuntary and detectable effect in males. Also it might be interesting to do a double blind test to examine any biological origin of homosexuality since the presence or absence of sweat in a sample would be (consciously) undetectable(or presumably easily masked judging by the article) by the subject.
throw cold water on this super-laser weapon high-technology circlejerk, but has anyone considered the environmental impact of operating a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser directly in the stratosphere? The whole Ozone layer destruction debate that's taken place over the last 20 years has centered around Chloroflourocarbons(CFC's). It is specifically the Chlorine that forms compounds in the upper atmosphere and subsequently destroys large quantities of Ozone. Other compounds containing Bromine(one halogen down on the periodic table) such as Halon systems used to supress fires in large computer systems is tens if not hundreds of times more destructive to the Ozone layer than Chlorine. One more hop down the table is Iodine, I can't find much information on the destructiveness of Iodine but considering the trend of higher destructive power as the halogen electronegativity gets lower it would be even more dangerous. Considering that the Iodine is being vaporized and dumped DIRECTLY INTO THE OZONE LAYER, I think this issue warrants at least a second look.
I work at the lab where these guys did this. They gave a fascinating lecture on it a few weeks ago, here's their website complete with pictures.
Sanyo thinks its oled's will be ready for production in a year. Here is their prototype 15 inch oled display made with >a href=http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/display/sanyo Flat.jhtml>Kodak's technology.
Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post I guess. The E-H (ie. light emitting) recombination layer will be inorganic CdSe quantum dots but the charge transport layers will be organic semiconductors.
..only a matter of time until an ANTI-SAUNABB is built in order to be smashed into the SAUNABB.
not necessarily, you can withstand far higher acute doses to your extremities than you can to your whole body.
"IIRC one of the biggest advantages of stippling in rendering surfaces is that you can get a fast simulation of transparency."
Of course, IANADoctor, but I would imagine that this technique would also be very useful in so called "4D" ultrasound systems. Increasing the speed of rendered frames with transparency would allow visualization of fast motion such as heart valves in 3 dimentions and real time. I don't think this is possible with any method except ultrasound (spin relaxation times make MRI unfeasable and CT's have to image serially with individual slices by moving the patient).
Incidentally, in my opinion, I don't think there many examples as perfect as this technology is of the Arthur C. Clarke quote of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Think about it, if you were a person living just 200 years ago what would you think of a device that when touched to someone's body, allowed you to see what was happening inside live on a screen?
"And they have, essentially, reproduced out of control."
what's "control"? They obey the same laws of physics and chemistry as every other organism on the planet and through millions of years of adaptation they exist in balance with those other organisms, consumning and being consumed by them.
Why can't I consider bacteria "Nanites"?
"We can't 'eat' air and dirt and use it (and it alone) to grow and reproduce. Nanites could, in theory, do just that, by using raw materials in the air and the earth to reproduce. "
NO, neither could "Nanites"; simply being super tiny dosen't confer upon you the ability to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics! The amount of negative entropy available in any such reaction from eating air and dirt would be so miniscule as to prevent the Nanite from reproducing uncontrollably. Just like THESE bacteria that acually DO subsist on air nd dirt alone(nearly).
The parent post's point still stands, as I see it.
"Communications won't collapse--most long-haul lines are based around fibre now, which is essentially impervious to solar radiation."
It does not matter that the information itself is carried on light inside of fibers of glass. The signals inside the fiber can only travel ~100Km at the most before they need to be boosted again by an amplifier. This is done by doping a small section of the fiber with Erbium atoms and esentially making it lase(stimulated emission) by irradiating it with intense light from semiconductor lasers. There are common CONDUCTIVE cables cladding the main fiber line in a fiber optic cable that supply the amplifiers that are spread out all along the line with power to run. What happenes when huge lengths of conductive cable are immersed in a (potentially quickly) changing magnetic field? Thats right, gigantic currents are set up in the cable and can destroy any sensitive devices connected to it. Thereby rendering the fiber dark.
Hubble's CCD's will NOT be fried by the intensity of light from the moon. This has got to be the most common misconception about Hubble. A 2 second search for "Hubble + Moon" gives you THIS as the very first result!!!
well... seeing as how you've helped pilot interSTELLAR spacecraft I think the LEAST you could do is give us a hand with our puny "space station" at earth's L1 point. I mean, jeez!
first, you need to be able to tell the difference.
It seems strange to me that the reason the planets were found not to exist is because the sunspots on the surface of the star somehow masqueraded as doppler shifts, thereby creating the illusion that a doppler spectroscopy observation had found a planet. This is the scenario that both news sources allude to. It seems much more likely that the giant sunspot would fool an astronomer using the so called transit photometry method of planet detection, whereby the transit of a planet in front of the stars disk dimms it slightly, having the same effect that a large sunspot would as it traverses the rotating stars viewable surface. Can anyone who knows more about this story explain what really happened?
Hands up if you think watching the scientific method in action is cool. This is how science actually works, a claim is made/published it's peer reviewed and the stage of experimental replication attempts is begun; if they prove negative, as they have been, the original claim is thrown out. Science and it's self-correcting nature is the most powerful tool we have to discover the nature of the universe. Just because you don't understand how it works dosn't mean your smug musings are "insightful".
buuuut.....the article was critical of the whole crop circle/ created by aliens phenomenon. It certainly wasn't an endorsment of that waste of film Signs. It makes me NOT want to see it.
whoops. rather the above should of course read "Scientific American".
The latest issue of Scientific has an enligtening short article on the fine mischief of crop circles. (no doubt released in a timely manner in an effort to counter some of the nonsense from the release of the movie Signs.)
Don't forget, the most important thing about NIF is that it will IGNITE IT'S PLASMA!! It will be the fist fusion experiment in the laboratory to achieve ignition. That is to say, the heat produced by the helium nuclei from the fusion of Deuterium and Tritium in the fuel capsule will be sufficient to continue powering the complete burn of the capsule without additional external
power input.
"Could they build units that grabbed inductive power from a transmitter in your glasses to overcome that problem, or maybe even allow super night vision?"
I bet these people in the trial already have a form of "night vision" from their implant. The human eye's response to light cuts off at ~700nm; most photosensitive electronics extend well past that. All you'd need to do is buy one of these and plug it in!
It wasn't mentioned in the Chandra release or the CNN spot, but RX J1856.5-3754 is apparently the closest known neutron star. The Chandra site states it's distance at ~400 lyr and the APOD site cites 180 lyr, practically in our back yard!(in cosmological distances anyway)
Yes, I hear that the engineers down in the kinetoscope development room, have obtained a copy for "testing" purposes. Word has it that Mme. Irwin shows her ankles!!
Interestingly (to me anyway), the technology that would be required to make this sort of analysis possible and still fit in to the size of a toilet while being cheap enough to sell for common use was just invented two months ago. The complex kinds of analysis(more than just glucose measurements) they are hoping to eventually do with these things(cancer detection etc.) is going to require looking at the presence and concentration of complex biomolecules, which presumably they'd use and FTIR setup to do. The new "Quantum-Cascade" lasers are the only ones to offer the small, solid state, tunable, mid-infrared, coherent, broadband lightsource you would need for the spectroscopy instrument.
1)Liberally pepper your post with oversimplified pseudoscientific pablum such as "...And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl" thereby craftily distracting your audience's attention away from any actual facts about the true magnitude of the disaster. For instance that annoying little statistic of Thyroid cancer(yes I did specifically pick a site from the WHO as a jab at your laughably out of context quote) incidence increasing by oh, 10 times or so. Or maybe the statement by the Board on Effects of Ionizing Radiation and the International Commission on Radiation Protection that the collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts released from Chernobyl to the population of the USSR would correspond to 24,000 additional deaths(from the Federation of American Scientists) in that area?
2)Proclaim your unquestioned infinite knowledge on all things related to the topic at hand: "In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there." Phew good thing we have people like you to tell us such important things lest we waste millions paying doctors of geology to try to figure out such things.
3)Regurgitate amateurish propaganda supporting your cause which contains self-parodying scare tactics aimed at any opposing viewpoints: "Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!!". It's important to remember that while using this shoe-in of a tactic to attain your +5 that you should ignore all obvious holes in your strawman theory such as the fact that coal has BACKGROUND levels of radiation, and burning it has negligible effect on concentrating this radiation. By Spike hay's logic I could argue that the millions of human bodies incinerated every year in cremation ceremonies increases the radioactive pollution of the atmosphere and soil because of all that Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 released when your body burns. Why it must be thousands of tones total every year!!
4)Finally if all else fails, just make a link like he does to to the nearest nut job you can find whose home page should have the latest instructions on "How to Find Osama bin Laden with guaranteed anonymity" apparently using some whacked out pin number conspiracy theory or some such scheme.
That's all! Your're on your way to karma whore heaven! (p.s. i'm already at 50 so I don't really give a crap about what happens to this post)