Nuclear energy: Fission. A lot of the weight of an Earth bound nuclear reactor is shielding and safety equipment which is (quite rightly) mandatory. On the moon? "Oh hell, the reactor's melted down. Good thing we sited it 100Km from the base". BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
The Voyager probes are technically nuclear powered, but it is not the same beast as in a chain reaction fusion reactor. The probes use an RTG which converts some of the heat released from natural radioactive decay into electricity. These do not produce electricty on nearly the same scale as a thermal fission reactor. The RTGs in the Voyager probes are generating about 300 Watts. That couldn't even power some gamers' desktop computers, much less a large scale SiO2 -> Si + O2 manufacturing process. Granted, a large number of RTGs could be used, as well as using larger and more efficient RTGs, but it seems likely to me that the amount of PU-238 (as well as some of the more exotic materials needed to drive the process would be cost prohibitive for any useful amount of oxygen.
All that, and RTGs still need a way to get rid of excess heat, as a thermocouple relies on the difference in temperature to produce electricity. The amount of heat that needs to be removed from a voyager level RTG is not that significant and can probably be accomplished through simple radiation, but the amount needed to drive a major industrial process would require some fairly exotic cooling techniques (although on the lunar night a good portion of the waste heat could be reclaimed to heat living quarters, etc.
The investors are not absolutely sure that a space elevator from earth is possible. I'm sure they ran some level of risk/benefit analysis and thought the insanely huge gobs of profit made available by being part of the organization that has a controling stake in the space elevator (or even A space elevator) is worth even a decently small chance that A)a space elevator from earth is possible and B)the group they are funding is the one that finally makes the patents on the tech.
The potentially obscenely low possibility that their group will be the one that patents the tech behind the space elevator is also partially offset by the fact that extreme research such as this can also lead to OTHER profitable discoveries. That and for some investors, the childlike wonder of being a part of something so interesting is worth it, whether or not it pans out. Kinda like the fun of designing some "really neat" tree house as a kid.
Oh yeah... I was originally going to use Duck Tape (R) but my preliminary research (I.E. farting around on the internet) revealed that the adhesive of this product melts over time when exposed to the heat expected when held close to a body (I.E. in a back pocket.) This leads to a sticky mess where all the stuff in the wallet gets covered in gooey adhesive. I get the feeling the situation would be at least as bad with electrical tape... that stuff ends up being a real mess after a while.
I'm thinking about it... and about to make wallet 2.0 as we speak. Or as I write, or...
Anyways, I'm thinking that simply covering the seams with duck tape would really do all that much good, as once the metallic tape fatigues and rips it is quite sharp and would just cut through the duck tape. I'll probably end up using duck for the seams and leaving a small space between the panels of metallic tape.
Oh, and for those about to flame me, the name is duck tape. Gray fabric tape was originally produced for sealing ammunition cases, keeping the contents dry. Hence the name duck, as in "water off a duck's back." In fact, using gray fabric tape on heating/cooling ducts is against the building codes of a large number of municipalities. The proper tape to use in these situations is... the silver metallic tape that I use for the body of the wallet. So, my wallet will be comprised of duct and duck tapes. I suppose I could be flamed for failing to capitalize and possible use a trademark sign on the brand name "Duck Tape" but... eh.
Don't knock it. I made a tin foil wallet (well, actually metallic tape as used for ductwork.) If I put my RFID card in it, the scanner at work would not open the door. That, and I got a whole lot of cashiers to break out of zombie mode and actually smile with my uber-shiny wallet. Big problem is the folds... metal tends to fatigue fairly quickly, so the wallet split along the seams in a few weeks. Never got around to making shiny wallet 2.0 with a new material for the seams.
What got people is that it was actually made of the tape (plus a piece of plastic over the driver's liscense for flashing my ID) and not just a tape covered wallet.
As the top is open it is not quite a full Faraday Cage, so I have no idea how well it would stand up to a higher powered attack, but it would definately reduce the range of long distance reads.
I recall hearing that another clue as to whether there is a nearby planet is a periodic, albeit slight, reduction in luminosity as the planet goes BEHIND the star, as the reflected light is blocked by the star itself. It is feasible that using very sensitive equpment we could check the differences in spectral emissions between these points and determine an approximate total reflectivity of the planet.
If we would find earth-like reflection one could surmise that this planet would be a good place to look for life. Not that a terran environment is the only kind that could spawn life, but it is the only one I know of that has definitively spawned life, and in particular given rise to self-aware society forming organisms (which is what the search for ET life is really hoping for.)
Low UID implies being a certain age. After a while you get tired of just getting pissed on cheap stuff. Once you develop a taste for liquor (or wine or good beer) you begin to realize that a $40 bottle of scotch can be more bang for the buck than cheap macro-brew if you are looking for overall enjoyment rather than just getting drunk.
I am somewhere in between: I thoroughly enjoy my 15yr bottles of The Glenlivet and The Macallan (not so much a fan of Glenfiddich) but I can still rock out the $1.29 40oz of Lucky Number High Gravity when the occasion demands. Then again, my UID's a bit higher than slashpot's. Probably by a year or two.
Just that I somehow manage to drive 75MPH to work every day without posting essays on the Internet about how Speed Limits are immoral and the Highway Patrol are corrupt assholes who incorrectly pull over Grannys.
Head on over to any automotive forum for those posts.
DRMBOT 0110, GTRBOT666 and AUTOMATOM agree with you.. The Ape Which Hath No Name and The Son of The Ape Which Hath No Name still love you. The Headless Hornsmen simply don't have all that much to say on the issue.
If every single car on the road was a Toyota Camry, it would indeed be very easy to learn how to drive a new car when you decide to upgrade, same as if every computer was running one operating system.
Also, once thieves learn how to break in and steal the car, every single vehicle on the road becomes instantly vulnerable, same as your computer. You would no longer be able to keep anything of any value in the car, same with the data that you would keep on the computer. You would not be able to rely on your car even being there as someone may have stolen it, just as your computer might no longer function if it gets a virus.
The difference between an amateur and a professional is going to make the two always complimentary. A professional is doing it for their career, so they therefore have to be pretty sure that what they are going to do will make money (either directly, through grants, or simply through gaining status/job security) if they want to keep putting bread on the table and making payments on their morgtage. Etymologically an amateur does what they do because they love doing it. Since it is more of a hobby to them, an amateur can do something just because they enjoy doing it. If they don't find the next big thing, no problem. They had fun doing it, and their real job paid the bills along the way. A dialog between scientific professionals and amateurs should be maintained as amateurs may be able to find something which has great promise to the scientific field but needs highly specialiced equipment to verify. On the flip side, professionals may make a discovery which would be too labor intensive to effectively complete without the aid of amateurs (SETI@home would be a decent example of this, where every cycle would have to accounted for and budgeted accordingly, while the "spare" cycles of amateurs can be used effectively for trial and error calculations and shot in the dark type hypotheses.)
On a semi-related note, the internet is becoming a more powerful tool for performing these collaborations. For instance, my father is currently trying to work on a more generalized mathematical theory of gravity (current mainstream theories basically assume spheres with consistant matter distributions, but the basic theories can fail with other objects at a close enough distance.) If he had a blog explaining his theory, other amateurs could comment and give him ideas to work on and some tricks to help test it out and refine it. It would take significant hardware, software and mathematical models which are probably out of the reach of most amateurs to actually model the gravitational interactions between, say two cubes with rotation, movement and oddly distributed masses once relativistic effects, the propogation delay in gravitonic waves/particles and other obscure phenomenon are taken into account. Actually getting something useful in engineering terms is probably out of the reach of someone running the models through a spreadsheet and eventually some visual basic on a fairly modest desktop machine.
My guess is that absorb is really not what is going on, they just use that term as the article is for non-scientists. Adsorb is likely alot closer to the truth, although maybe a modified version. While it doesn't actually compress the hydrogen in the traditional sense, what I assume what is really meant is something to the effect that 1L of the substrate could bind to the equivalent of 900L of uncompressed Hydrogen. That seems like a ridiculous amount of compression, but it is probably similar to compressing it to a liquid state. From Wikipedia liquid hydrogen has a density of 70.8 kg/m while gaseous hydrogen has a density of 0.08988 g/L. Since 1 liter is 1/1000 of a m^3 the units are equivalent, so liquifying hydrogen produces a compression ratio of around 787:1. Since the hydrogen is being stored as a solid one could expect even more density gains and additionally concerns of danger due to pressure and innefficiencies due to molecular loss (since hydrogen is so small a significant amount will seep through any seams in the storage tanks) are pretty much negated.
It seems that once the spheres are created it is possible to essentially refill them by exposing them to a high pressure hydrogen solution, and then the hydrogen can be liberated with the application of heat and a partial vacuum. My concern is how much energy would be required to complete these processes. Although engineering techniques could allow waste heat from the combustion process to be used to liberate the majority of the hydrogen, with a small amount of energy from a battery or other storage system being used to liberate the original heat needed to start the engine or fuel cell. The vacuum possibly needed to liberate the hydrogen could be obtained relatively trivially if the hydrogen is used in an Internal Combustion Engine, but it seems likely that this would be used more with fuel cell technologies which means the vacuum would have to be specially created leading to some level of innefficiency. There would also probably be some overall energy consumption required in returning the glass balls to the recharging plant, although it may be possible to recharge the balls at the gas station economies of scale would seem to dictate returning to a central processing plant (although I have absolutely no data to confirm this, simply a gut feeling.)
And of course all of this does not get beyond the fact that hydrogen is not an energy source, but simply an energy storage medium with a fair amount of innefficiencies involved in creating it. The whole process from cradle to grave is going to be extremely expensive, using a large amount of relatively rare materials in a system whose components would likely degrade over time and require replacing and servicing. I really have my doubts that this invention is going to be the final key to solving all of our energy problems, but it could very well be one more tiny tiny push for some specific applications on the way to eventually weening society from the direct need for fossil fuel usage. A cheap, convienient, plentiful, clean, safe and renewable power source is still needed to drive the whole system, and right now I believe fossil fuels as a whole are the best compromise for the whole range of requirements. Although significant technological advances in alternative energy sources as well as the eventually inevitable reduction in fossil fuel supplies will eventually tip the scales to the point that fossil fuels are no longer the most economical energy source (economical including both internal and external costs.)
1)The realize that they already have enough money and now are just trying to let people listen to some music they make.
2)The record companies gets the feeling that the band/artist/whatever is likely to do this in the future. That's when the career ends.
Oh, and another thing. Pearl Jam's career really isn't dead. They're currently on tour. It looks like they even have double bookings for some stadium sized venues. As in they sold out a stadium... twice. That's pretty good for a "dead" band that is getting very little radio support on the tour.
Still, this can be seen as more of a failed experiment than a conclusive result.
I have a feeling that the military views this more as a live beta test, with the strengths and weaknesses of the system being identified and evaluated.
I'm pretty sure that you won't be able to get your ship up to 8C. you see, due to relatavistic effects your mass increases as you approach light speed. In order to get up to 1C, it would take... let me do my calculations... infinite energy. Although you may be right about the travellers perceiving 32 years having passed on the journey, once you consider time/space dilation. It's just that it's likely that hundred or thousands of years would have passed by from the resting frames POV. This effect has been used to dramatic effect in many Sci-Fi stories.
I personally think you are on the wrong track here.
In order to guarantee our safety, the fuel should be heated over a peat fire and then stored in quality oaken casks. Preferably for a minimum of 12 years, although 15 years would be a better bet. While this safety measure will result in a much greater time to market, this results in a far more effective product for short trips. Longer trips can be fueled with more inexpensive alternatives.
Pyridoxine hydrochloride: Pyridoxine is vitamin B6. The hydrochloride is tacked on as a salt to make it possible to absorb through the digestive tract. Good for you. Then again, that's not that hard to pronounce. Peer eh docks een.
Cyanocobalamin... I thnk that's another B vitamin. Quick google search reveals B12. Just because the word is scary doesn't mean the compound is.
FDA for medical and food use, EPA for general use, OSHA for use in a workplace (which would provide redundant coverage in a number of cases... for example the FDA would have oversight in the direct applications in medical use, while OSHA would cover the long term ancilliary exposure that medical professionals recieve, as long as those involved in the manufacturing process. EPA would even have oversight into the manufacturing and disposal processes.
Most likely an inter-agency commission would be the ideal (or rather least bad) way of creating policies governing best use practices in the vast majority of nanotech applications.
From the article the chance of its genetically engineered rice ending up in the food supply is remote because the company grinds the rice and extracts the protein before shipping.
There is no way that ecological activists would ever let this product get out on the market if they got wind that the company was going to allow people to grow it themselves.
Here's a bigger question: do you really think that families who are faced with their children dying of dehydration will be able to afford this product? Sure, there will be a small number treated with it due to volunteer hospitals, peace corps, red cross, religious organizations, etc. But the great majority of this will be sold at profit to families who are not at a significant risk of dying from diarrhea related dehydration.
Not that I'm saying that, if the product is effective, parents who can afford it should forego it simply because there are children out there whose family can not afford it. But using the fact that children die of diarrhea as the tool to allow the company to be allowed to make it is misleading. Yes, there is a chance that the company as a whole intends to offer this at extremely discounted rates to poor children throughout the world. But I've been too jaded by pharm companies to realistically think that is on their agenda except as a couple high profile publicity maneuvers which don't put a dent in the problem (although it will be a good thing for those children lucky enough to be saved by the PR move, that's not why the investors and board of directors decided to go ahead with this concept.)
Problem is, this won't hit the developing countries. I'd guess this will be sold in drugstores next to pedialyte at a pretty hefty premium. Very few lives of poor children will be saved by this product (barring subsidies, rescue workers, donations etc.) This will just be used to reduce the uncomfort and risks associated with diarrhea in children whose parents are wealthy enough to afford the healthcare that would keep the children alive through the bout anyways.
I am not disputing that diarrhea kills a large number of children (I recall hearing that it is the leading cause of death in the world.) But families that can not afford clean water won't be able to afford this stuff. Not that offering the product to those who can afford it is evil, but they will use the fact that children do die of diarrhea as a scare tactic in advertising as well as gaining political leverage.
Slashdot Mirror
Metorites and other debris don't care where they kick dust up.
Nuclear energy: Fission. A lot of the weight of an Earth bound nuclear reactor is shielding and safety equipment which is (quite rightly) mandatory. On the moon? "Oh hell, the reactor's melted down. Good thing we sited it 100Km from the base". BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
The Voyager probes are technically nuclear powered, but it is not the same beast as in a chain reaction fusion reactor. The probes use an RTG which converts some of the heat released from natural radioactive decay into electricity. These do not produce electricty on nearly the same scale as a thermal fission reactor. The RTGs in the Voyager probes are generating about 300 Watts. That couldn't even power some gamers' desktop computers, much less a large scale SiO2 -> Si + O2 manufacturing process. Granted, a large number of RTGs could be used, as well as using larger and more efficient RTGs, but it seems likely to me that the amount of PU-238 (as well as some of the more exotic materials needed to drive the process would be cost prohibitive for any useful amount of oxygen.
All that, and RTGs still need a way to get rid of excess heat, as a thermocouple relies on the difference in temperature to produce electricity. The amount of heat that needs to be removed from a voyager level RTG is not that significant and can probably be accomplished through simple radiation, but the amount needed to drive a major industrial process would require some fairly exotic cooling techniques (although on the lunar night a good portion of the waste heat could be reclaimed to heat living quarters, etc.
The investors are not absolutely sure that a space elevator from earth is possible. I'm sure they ran some level of risk/benefit analysis and thought the insanely huge gobs of profit made available by being part of the organization that has a controling stake in the space elevator (or even A space elevator) is worth even a decently small chance that A)a space elevator from earth is possible and B)the group they are funding is the one that finally makes the patents on the tech.
The potentially obscenely low possibility that their group will be the one that patents the tech behind the space elevator is also partially offset by the fact that extreme research such as this can also lead to OTHER profitable discoveries. That and for some investors, the childlike wonder of being a part of something so interesting is worth it, whether or not it pans out. Kinda like the fun of designing some "really neat" tree house as a kid.
That's why you have the alarm button on the key fob.
Oh yeah... I was originally going to use Duck Tape (R) but my preliminary research (I.E. farting around on the internet) revealed that the adhesive of this product melts over time when exposed to the heat expected when held close to a body (I.E. in a back pocket.) This leads to a sticky mess where all the stuff in the wallet gets covered in gooey adhesive. I get the feeling the situation would be at least as bad with electrical tape... that stuff ends up being a real mess after a while.
I'm thinking about it... and about to make wallet 2.0 as we speak. Or as I write, or...
Anyways, I'm thinking that simply covering the seams with duck tape would really do all that much good, as once the metallic tape fatigues and rips it is quite sharp and would just cut through the duck tape. I'll probably end up using duck for the seams and leaving a small space between the panels of metallic tape.
Oh, and for those about to flame me, the name is duck tape. Gray fabric tape was originally produced for sealing ammunition cases, keeping the contents dry. Hence the name duck, as in "water off a duck's back." In fact, using gray fabric tape on heating/cooling ducts is against the building codes of a large number of municipalities. The proper tape to use in these situations is... the silver metallic tape that I use for the body of the wallet. So, my wallet will be comprised of duct and duck tapes. I suppose I could be flamed for failing to capitalize and possible use a trademark sign on the brand name "Duck Tape" but... eh.
Don't knock it. I made a tin foil wallet (well, actually metallic tape as used for ductwork.) If I put my RFID card in it, the scanner at work would not open the door. That, and I got a whole lot of cashiers to break out of zombie mode and actually smile with my uber-shiny wallet. Big problem is the folds... metal tends to fatigue fairly quickly, so the wallet split along the seams in a few weeks. Never got around to making shiny wallet 2.0 with a new material for the seams.
What got people is that it was actually made of the tape (plus a piece of plastic over the driver's liscense for flashing my ID) and not just a tape covered wallet.
As the top is open it is not quite a full Faraday Cage, so I have no idea how well it would stand up to a higher powered attack, but it would definately reduce the range of long distance reads.
And most of all, I really don't want the spyware associated with your toolbar.
I guess my days of purchasing off Ebay may be just about over.
I recall hearing that another clue as to whether there is a nearby planet is a periodic, albeit slight, reduction in luminosity as the planet goes BEHIND the star, as the reflected light is blocked by the star itself. It is feasible that using very sensitive equpment we could check the differences in spectral emissions between these points and determine an approximate total reflectivity of the planet.
If we would find earth-like reflection one could surmise that this planet would be a good place to look for life. Not that a terran environment is the only kind that could spawn life, but it is the only one I know of that has definitively spawned life, and in particular given rise to self-aware society forming organisms (which is what the search for ET life is really hoping for.)
Hey... high class/Low UID drunk makes sense.
Low UID implies being a certain age. After a while you get tired of just getting pissed on cheap stuff. Once you develop a taste for liquor (or wine or good beer) you begin to realize that a $40 bottle of scotch can be more bang for the buck than cheap macro-brew if you are looking for overall enjoyment rather than just getting drunk.
I am somewhere in between: I thoroughly enjoy my 15yr bottles of The Glenlivet and The Macallan (not so much a fan of Glenfiddich) but I can still rock out the $1.29 40oz of Lucky Number High Gravity when the occasion demands. Then again, my UID's a bit higher than slashpot's. Probably by a year or two.
Just that I somehow manage to drive 75MPH to work every day without posting essays on the Internet about how Speed Limits are immoral and the Highway Patrol are corrupt assholes who incorrectly pull over Grannys.
Head on over to any automotive forum for those posts.
DRMBOT 0110, GTRBOT666 and AUTOMATOM agree with you.. The Ape Which Hath No Name and The Son of The Ape Which Hath No Name still love you. The Headless Hornsmen simply don't have all that much to say on the issue.
Wow, a car/computer analogy that actually works.
If every single car on the road was a Toyota Camry, it would indeed be very easy to learn how to drive a new car when you decide to upgrade, same as if every computer was running one operating system.
Also, once thieves learn how to break in and steal the car, every single vehicle on the road becomes instantly vulnerable, same as your computer. You would no longer be able to keep anything of any value in the car, same with the data that you would keep on the computer. You would not be able to rely on your car even being there as someone may have stolen it, just as your computer might no longer function if it gets a virus.
The difference between an amateur and a professional is going to make the two always complimentary. A professional is doing it for their career, so they therefore have to be pretty sure that what they are going to do will make money (either directly, through grants, or simply through gaining status/job security) if they want to keep putting bread on the table and making payments on their morgtage. Etymologically an amateur does what they do because they love doing it. Since it is more of a hobby to them, an amateur can do something just because they enjoy doing it. If they don't find the next big thing, no problem. They had fun doing it, and their real job paid the bills along the way. A dialog between scientific professionals and amateurs should be maintained as amateurs may be able to find something which has great promise to the scientific field but needs highly specialiced equipment to verify. On the flip side, professionals may make a discovery which would be too labor intensive to effectively complete without the aid of amateurs (SETI@home would be a decent example of this, where every cycle would have to accounted for and budgeted accordingly, while the "spare" cycles of amateurs can be used effectively for trial and error calculations and shot in the dark type hypotheses.)
On a semi-related note, the internet is becoming a more powerful tool for performing these collaborations. For instance, my father is currently trying to work on a more generalized mathematical theory of gravity (current mainstream theories basically assume spheres with consistant matter distributions, but the basic theories can fail with other objects at a close enough distance.) If he had a blog explaining his theory, other amateurs could comment and give him ideas to work on and some tricks to help test it out and refine it. It would take significant hardware, software and mathematical models which are probably out of the reach of most amateurs to actually model the gravitational interactions between, say two cubes with rotation, movement and oddly distributed masses once relativistic effects, the propogation delay in gravitonic waves/particles and other obscure phenomenon are taken into account. Actually getting something useful in engineering terms is probably out of the reach of someone running the models through a spreadsheet and eventually some visual basic on a fairly modest desktop machine.
My guess is that absorb is really not what is going on, they just use that term as the article is for non-scientists. Adsorb is likely alot closer to the truth, although maybe a modified version. While it doesn't actually compress the hydrogen in the traditional sense, what I assume what is really meant is something to the effect that 1L of the substrate could bind to the equivalent of 900L of uncompressed Hydrogen. That seems like a ridiculous amount of compression, but it is probably similar to compressing it to a liquid state. From Wikipedia liquid hydrogen has a density of 70.8 kg/m while gaseous hydrogen has a density of 0.08988 g/L. Since 1 liter is 1/1000 of a m^3 the units are equivalent, so liquifying hydrogen produces a compression ratio of around 787:1. Since the hydrogen is being stored as a solid one could expect even more density gains and additionally concerns of danger due to pressure and innefficiencies due to molecular loss (since hydrogen is so small a significant amount will seep through any seams in the storage tanks) are pretty much negated.
It seems that once the spheres are created it is possible to essentially refill them by exposing them to a high pressure hydrogen solution, and then the hydrogen can be liberated with the application of heat and a partial vacuum. My concern is how much energy would be required to complete these processes. Although engineering techniques could allow waste heat from the combustion process to be used to liberate the majority of the hydrogen, with a small amount of energy from a battery or other storage system being used to liberate the original heat needed to start the engine or fuel cell. The vacuum possibly needed to liberate the hydrogen could be obtained relatively trivially if the hydrogen is used in an Internal Combustion Engine, but it seems likely that this would be used more with fuel cell technologies which means the vacuum would have to be specially created leading to some level of innefficiency. There would also probably be some overall energy consumption required in returning the glass balls to the recharging plant, although it may be possible to recharge the balls at the gas station economies of scale would seem to dictate returning to a central processing plant (although I have absolutely no data to confirm this, simply a gut feeling.)
And of course all of this does not get beyond the fact that hydrogen is not an energy source, but simply an energy storage medium with a fair amount of innefficiencies involved in creating it. The whole process from cradle to grave is going to be extremely expensive, using a large amount of relatively rare materials in a system whose components would likely degrade over time and require replacing and servicing. I really have my doubts that this invention is going to be the final key to solving all of our energy problems, but it could very well be one more tiny tiny push for some specific applications on the way to eventually weening society from the direct need for fossil fuel usage. A cheap, convienient, plentiful, clean, safe and renewable power source is still needed to drive the whole system, and right now I believe fossil fuels as a whole are the best compromise for the whole range of requirements. Although significant technological advances in alternative energy sources as well as the eventually inevitable reduction in fossil fuel supplies will eventually tip the scales to the point that fossil fuels are no longer the most economical energy source (economical including both internal and external costs.)
It could be two things
1)The realize that they already have enough money and now are just trying to let people listen to some music they make.
2)The record companies gets the feeling that the band/artist/whatever is likely to do this in the future. That's when the career ends.
Oh, and another thing. Pearl Jam's career really isn't dead. They're currently on tour. It looks like they even have double bookings for some stadium sized venues. As in they sold out a stadium... twice. That's pretty good for a "dead" band that is getting very little radio support on the tour.
Still, this can be seen as more of a failed experiment than a conclusive result.
I have a feeling that the military views this more as a live beta test, with the strengths and weaknesses of the system being identified and evaluated.
But small children will choke on 0's.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN????!!??
I'm pretty sure that you won't be able to get your ship up to 8C. you see, due to relatavistic effects your mass increases as you approach light speed. In order to get up to 1C, it would take... let me do my calculations... infinite energy. Although you may be right about the travellers perceiving 32 years having passed on the journey, once you consider time/space dilation. It's just that it's likely that hundred or thousands of years would have passed by from the resting frames POV. This effect has been used to dramatic effect in many Sci-Fi stories.
I personally think you are on the wrong track here.
In order to guarantee our safety, the fuel should be heated over a peat fire and then stored in quality oaken casks. Preferably for a minimum of 12 years, although 15 years would be a better bet. While this safety measure will result in a much greater time to market, this results in a far more effective product for short trips. Longer trips can be fueled with more inexpensive alternatives.
Pyridoxine hydrochloride: Pyridoxine is vitamin B6. The hydrochloride is tacked on as a salt to make it possible to absorb through the digestive tract. Good for you. Then again, that's not that hard to pronounce. Peer eh docks een.
Cyanocobalamin... I thnk that's another B vitamin. Quick google search reveals B12. Just because the word is scary doesn't mean the compound is.
FDA for medical and food use, EPA for general use, OSHA for use in a workplace (which would provide redundant coverage in a number of cases... for example the FDA would have oversight in the direct applications in medical use, while OSHA would cover the long term ancilliary exposure that medical professionals recieve, as long as those involved in the manufacturing process. EPA would even have oversight into the manufacturing and disposal processes.
Most likely an inter-agency commission would be the ideal (or rather least bad) way of creating policies governing best use practices in the vast majority of nanotech applications.
From the article the chance of its genetically engineered rice ending up in the food supply is remote because the company grinds the rice and extracts the protein before shipping.
There is no way that ecological activists would ever let this product get out on the market if they got wind that the company was going to allow people to grow it themselves.
Here's a bigger question: do you really think that families who are faced with their children dying of dehydration will be able to afford this product? Sure, there will be a small number treated with it due to volunteer hospitals, peace corps, red cross, religious organizations, etc. But the great majority of this will be sold at profit to families who are not at a significant risk of dying from diarrhea related dehydration.
Not that I'm saying that, if the product is effective, parents who can afford it should forego it simply because there are children out there whose family can not afford it. But using the fact that children die of diarrhea as the tool to allow the company to be allowed to make it is misleading. Yes, there is a chance that the company as a whole intends to offer this at extremely discounted rates to poor children throughout the world. But I've been too jaded by pharm companies to realistically think that is on their agenda except as a couple high profile publicity maneuvers which don't put a dent in the problem (although it will be a good thing for those children lucky enough to be saved by the PR move, that's not why the investors and board of directors decided to go ahead with this concept.)
Problem is, this won't hit the developing countries. I'd guess this will be sold in drugstores next to pedialyte at a pretty hefty premium. Very few lives of poor children will be saved by this product (barring subsidies, rescue workers, donations etc.) This will just be used to reduce the uncomfort and risks associated with diarrhea in children whose parents are wealthy enough to afford the healthcare that would keep the children alive through the bout anyways.
I am not disputing that diarrhea kills a large number of children (I recall hearing that it is the leading cause of death in the world.) But families that can not afford clean water won't be able to afford this stuff. Not that offering the product to those who can afford it is evil, but they will use the fact that children do die of diarrhea as a scare tactic in advertising as well as gaining political leverage.