If Jupiter had somehow been lit (by being hit by an object the size of uranus, say - I've been told that would have done it), it would have burned out in the deep, deep precambrian (billions of years ago). It doesn't have five billion years of fuel. While burning in the early stages of earthly development, it would have been about as bright as the moon (of course, the sun at that time was bluer and overall dimmer). Butterfly flaps it's wings in China, I know, but I don't think it would have been enough of a change in the overall radiation level on earth that whatever conditions allowed life to rise on earth wouldn't have been in effect. Given those conditions, you ask - is life likely to arise, or is it a rare event even in the conditions that favor it (over the course of billions of years,) such that a tiny change in conditions could have prevented that one spark of life from occuring? As a molecular biologist with interests in the field of molecular evolution and structural biology, I'm going to say - no, given that conditions that favor the appearance of life (as a chemical phenomenon) it's going to happen.
If Jupiter were more massive - simply igniting it without changing it's mass wouldn't cause it to exert more gravity - well, yeah, all bets are off, since that would imply very different things about the environment under which the entire solar system formed. Although, it just occured to me, Jupiter's core is still undergoing nuclear reactions (so is the earth's core) just not on a stellar scale. I don't see how we'd know if those reactions had been much faster/brighter three billion years ago. We'd have to guess from the amount of heavy hydrogen present in the Jovian atmosphere, and I don't think our measurements (radio spectroscopy? something about Jupiter's magnetic properties?)are precise enough to figure that out.
Yeah, the pictures are pretty (awesome, if real) but I'm going to wait for pictures from the Hubble (which had better be forthcoming!) before I'm totally persuaded.
That said - 58 light years? That's a long trip, but totally possible.
Anyone else feel like this thing was designed by a Focus group? They call in a bunch of modestly tech literate 18-35 yr olds (the target demographic for pricey home theatre equipment) and write down all the things they hear it should do.
"And you should win stuff by watching!" - Millhouse (the Simpsons), Poochy the dog episode
This may explain why color blindness is less prevalent in women, if they start out with
two and lose one they still can see color about as well as a man.
Color blindness is less prevalent in women because the gene that allows color perception is on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes - in order for a woman to be color blind both copies of the gene must be "broken". Same story as hemophilia - the gene that causes blood to clot is on the X chromosome, so if a man gets a single broken copy from his Mom, he has the condition.
with no extra
'regular red' sensitivity I couldn't really distinguish it from a bright red (it is really red, prolly cuz it's
completely undetected by the blue & green receptors.)
Okay, the "near IR" that you can see is part of the spectrum that behaves as "visible" light but which our eyes (mostly) cannot detect. Detecting that light, and calling it red, doesn't do much to disturb your color vision, since, most of the time, that extra "color" shows up alongside regular red light and it doesn't do much.
Now, the deep infra-red, the kind that you need to be able to see to have "heat vision" doesn't have this property. You have cone receptors that see this particular color of light. Now, where in the nervous system are you going to attach them? My point is, there isn't a "fourth color" to attach them to - there is a great deal of complicated graymatter involved in vision processing and you can't just add a whole new set of inputs (well, we still don't know much about how it works but it certainly appears you can't.) Imagine, instead of seeing just R, B, G, R+B = V, R+G = O, and G+B = Y, we'd have to have six new secondary colors, hot Red, hot Blue, hot Green, hot Violet etc., as well as a new primary color (hot Black) and the brain just isn't equipped to cope with that.
You can wire them up just as if they were more red cones; so a hot newspaper looks pink. However, at that rate, the person would have a lot of trouble making any sense of what he or she saw.
Sorry, I meant to say, it would be almost impossible to distinguish IR from ambient heat using a chromophore. Obviously, there are all sorts of organic materials that image IR just fine. My bad. I don't know how snakes do it but I don't think it involves generating an electric potential in a chromophore.
In any case, adding the "pits" that snakes use to sense heat to someone's eyes would be even more difficult.
what would stop
them from changing the spectrum of vision? perhaps adding uv or infrared to the normal visible light
Firstly, such an eye would have very few advantages on a microcamera - in terms of ease of use, it would be much simpler to hide tiny cameras in artificial cavities in someone's body than to do what you're proposing. Furthermore, the nervous system requirements to process the additional information simply are not there (infrared = red and your superspy can't see normal colors? Ooh, sign me up today.)
In order to do what you're proposing, you'd need to take a human eye and genetically modify it so that it could safely detect either infra-red or UV light, problems with that proposal include -
1) The human eye works by converting photons in the visible range into electrical potentials, which then produce nerve impulses. Photons are converted into electrical potentials by chromphores (big, organic molecules with many double bonds.) These chromophores can allready detect UV, but when they do they're destroyed. There's a membrane in the eye that exists purely to screen UV out. So, if you want to be able to see UV, you have to modify all the receptors that are allready in there to resist UV.
2) Genetic modification of these chromophores is exceedingly difficult, since they are not coded for by genes in and of themselves (they are produced by a host of other proteins.) So, you'd need to replace the dozen or so proteins that make a chromophore (in a particular cell, at a particular time) with a dozen or so genes/proteins that make some UV (or IR) sensitive chromophore. Then, you'd need (somehow) to alter all of the proteins that recognised the old chromophore so that they recognise the new chromophore, instead, so that it is properly inserted into the cellular architecture. This sort of technology is, optimistically, a century away, and has many more sinister potential uses than making an organic wide-spectrum camera.
3) It is extremely difficult, using only organic molecules, to distinguish between IR and physical heat. Unlike infrared light, which makes bonds bounce back and forth more quickly (= heat), or ultraviolet light, which cleaves bonds (in addition), visible light has the property of raising the electric potential of "pi" electrons; electrons which participate in a double bond but which are not strictly required for the bond to exist. Note that by this definition "visible" light does extend a little farther in each direction than what we can actually see.
After you've finished your epic feat of genetic and chemical engineering, you need to take your modified cells and insert them into embryos who have had there eyes removed and see if the modified cells still grow into eyeballs. I envy your budget.
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 3, Informative
My main problem with this is that there are huge, massive problems with Monsanto - a total disregard for safety testing, obsession with secrecy and a tendency to corrupt governments,
It's irresponsible to make that kind of broad accusation without background. Here's some:
Ooh! Here's a whole page dedicated to how wicked monsanto is. You can learn about how Monsanto tried to cover up that fact that DDT was wiping out all the birds in California (yes, the evil corporation is the classic Silent Spring is none other than Monsanto.) They also made agent Orange, which had health effects that they tried to cover up.
Those really interested in the subject of chlorinated organics should read Pandora's Poison. The up-shot is that they are a technolgy which simply isn't safe, and that we should abandon them entirely, especially chlorine based pesticides. The book is highly informative, and also a good introduction for someone who's background is more in, say, computers.
So, the long and the short of it is that this is nothing new. Monsanto has been doing lots of stuff like ever since its inception.
Re:Monsanto akin to evil corporations from the mov
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Monsanto and PCBs
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All of what jayed_99 says is true.
However, the original idea with terminator seeds was that they would (I'm not sure how well it works - I gather it doesn't but Monsanto policy seems to be that objective truth is foreign to their religion) produce non-fertilising pollen. So, the seeds that monsanto sells are a hybrid of line A (fertile) and line B (fertile) which produces line C, which they sell, and which doesn't produce fertile pollen OR fertile seeds. In addition to meaning that you can't grow up line C yourself, or make your own lines that include whatever favorable genes where transgenically introduced into line C, this means that line C's pollen can't contaminate non engineered crops nearby, which is a huge problem with other GM foods (pause, looks askance at my Dorito.)
Now, terminator seeds are basically a dead issue because folks like jayed_99 simply refused to buy them.
This means that people are growing up (or being forced to grow up, by cross polination) the GM crops that Monsanto sells without paying for new seeds each time.
So, the next part of Monsanto's evil plan is to make their money selling chemicals (which they also make) instead of the GM crops themselves. Enter roundup ready Corn. You want evil, there's your classic Monsanto evil. The idea is that they can go ahead and give away the GM crops (although they'll continue to charge while they can), because the only thing the GM crops are good for is buying mroe roundup.... from Monsanto.
So, the trend in agro genetic engineering is to do stuff like that. Genetically engineering crops that resist perishability better, or which inherently resist pests, or are more nutritious, may be a losing proposition because the product is a living thing that is not easily controlled. However, genetically engineering pesticide resistance lets you sell more of your pesticide, which is where the big money is, anyway.
Of course, as a medical geneticist, I may have an unfair bias against evil (which seems to be Monsanto's position vis a vis the union of concerned scientists)
[The team] tested out the theory that learning results from a physical change that strengthens the connections between selected neurons. [They showed] how short- and long-term memories result from different physical effects in the brain
They showed physical effects that MAY be responsible for the phenomenon that we call memory. This is very good work, and it shows that these physical effects occur in the brain (there is some possibility that it's an artifact of their method but it's pretty slim.) They also occur on about the right timescale to explain memory. HOWEVER that is NOT sufficient to show that these physical effects are responsible for the phenomenon we call memory, just that they very well could be.
The point at which you call something "proven" can be fairly subjective but in this case we haven't eliminated other potential physical effects that might play some role, possibly a crucial or pivotal one, in actual memory.
As a scientist, I am convinced (just short of certain) that the effects that they've observed play some role in real memory. That doesn't mean that they play the definitive role.
I suspect that the scientists responsible for the research couched there statements in a number of caveats that the reporter simply ignored.
Okay, "slashdot sponsored" is the wrong word. Mediated through slashdot or organised via slashdot, I might say. Intel's adverts on slashdot would probably influence Slashdot's editorial board not to endorse this hypothetical boycott directly, but most of the moderation is done by readers (with no economic interest in slashdot) who certainly wouldn't feel so bound. Also, Slashdot carried this story which is not pro-intel any way you slice it.
Pulling their ads off of slashdot in response to such a boycott (or even threatening to do so) would be PR hari kiri with a rusty knife.
This isn't really a big enough action on Intel's part to justify a general boycott, put in perspective with the actions of other companies with a similar market cap, it's total small fry. It still makes me plenty angry.
Oregon Supreme Court declined to hear my case, leaving standing the unfavorable decision of the Oregon Appeals Court as the final authority
I'm sure merlyn/Mr. Schwartz has allready discussed this with his council, but of course the supreme court can take the case and over-rule the state court, the plaintive cries of certain states rights activitists notwithstanding. That's not going to happen, which basically means we need a political solution.
Individuals in Oregon can contact their governor individually, although such petitions are, unfortunately, unlikely to work.
Some form of organised lobbying - from an oregon based trade organisation of engineers or programmers, mayhap? (I'm a biologist) - might successfully generate a pardon, or at least get the law struck from the books. Certainly, I think it's a legitimate avenue for such an association to act, since the oregon computer crime law (which I can't find under that title but which is somewhere here) obviously opens its membership up to wanton and unjustified prosecution.
Although Intel is likely to announce that it's a criminal trial and Intel cannot drop charges, we could bring pressure to bear on Intel. I only buy AMDs anyway, but a threatened slashdot-sponsored boycott, if everyone on slashdot is as convinced of his fundamental innocence as I am, might scare them a little.
1: H2O is quite light. It's only 18g/mol. There's no other combination _I_ can think of that would be as light, as we humans are made
up of a lot of water.
Water is light, but it is dense (1.) Most organic solvents are density roughly 2/3rds, although they are more compressable than water (so they'd be roughly density 1 under high enough pressure.) Water's gross physical properties (density, viscocity and so forth) are important for a multicellular organism but, actually, if you were just a single alien cell, might not matter.
2: H2O is slightly polar, so it 'sticks' to certain structures a little more. Oil would be an interesting substitute to water, but oil is
large polimer chains. Too hard to create. However Ions would disrupt other chemicals. Also, Ions require water to have charge.
Ions require something polar (alcohol would do) to pair with, or they won't disaccoiate with their counterion. It need not be water - it could be alcohol, or it could be something exotic like liquid SH2. Atoms heavier than sulfur or iodine are insuffiently electronegative to hold much of a negative charge in a polar bond, so probably wouldn't be suitable.
The real problem is that your non-water based cell needs some way to seperate itself from the environment. If you're willing to call any self-replicating molecule "life," this may not be a requirement, but if you're looking for anything that's at least a recognisable organism, even if microscopic, this is a hard requirement to fill without water (or HI or H2S.)
The way cell membranes work is they have an oily portion (the membrane) with ionic stuff on the inside and the outside. So, you have a little bubble of water (the cell) wrapped in the oily membrane which is much like a soap bubble.
Now, in an oily solvent, at the right temperature, you might be able to have the reverse - like a hollow bubble of water floating in liquid soap. However, the forces that push small amounts of something polar out of a non-polar solute are MUCH WEAKER than the forces that push something oily out of water. This results not from an energetic effect, but from an entropic effect:
Water in a solvent state is fairly disordered, capable of forming H-bonds with different waters on all sides of it, and of tumbling around and forming different H-bonds. If you introduce a big oil molecule into the water, there are a number of positions that the water can't tumble into (people describe this as a crystal-like cage but that is inaccurate) so the water molecule becomes more ordered. This increase in order is extremely unfavorable, so all of the oily molecules are pushed out of contact with the water and into oil droplets; like when you mix oil and vinegar together.
The above is called the "hydrophobic effect" and it is the basis of how cells form embranes AND of how proteins become structured. It is pretty much the basis of all life. A similar effect does NOT occur with oily solvents! In fact, it doesn't much occur with ethanol; as far as I know, only other molecules which are much like water show this property.
3: Most of all biological elements are within the top 10 elements on the peridic chart. The reason these are used is because nuclear
fusion within the sun allows these to be made with much greater abundance. This reason also coves why no Earthen creatures use
silicon instead of carbon.
Sorry, that's not true. The earth has more iron atoms on it than carbon atoms, and scads every element through 44 (Nickel). What you say IS true for the outer planets, which didn't have their light elements significantly blasted off by some kind of solar event. Alien planets, which got their heavy elements from different supernovae (that's where heavy elements come from) might have mercury and gold in abundance as well. We don't know.
4: If you can accept the above examples of why water is better than other mostly inert transfer chemicals, then tempature also
comes into play. I know of no animals that use solid or gaseous blood. All use liquid of some type, just because diffusion (or in
water, osmosis) is easier to transport chemicals. The tempature of water being a liquid is between 255K and 310K , so most planets
are eliminated just because of the tempature needs strict control.
I cannot see life arising in solid state, because if the molecules can't move, you can't do the kind of complex molecular recognition chemistry that we understand as life.
In a gaseous state, same problem for reverse reasons - the molecules can't find each other.
That said, you can have pockets of liquid water (underground, say, or under higher pressure) at much higher temperatures. Other molecules with many of the properties of water (possibly enough) could be liquid at much lower temperatures. There is an outside chance that much larger molecules might be suitable and liquid at higher temperatures.
Really exotic solvents - like molten table salt - require temperatures so high that processes dependent on a high degree of order (like life) could never arise.
Another big problem is that complex organic solvents (polybenzenes and such) do not arise spontaneously, while water and amino acids do.
Long story short - a few very water like solvents, like HCl, H2S or HI - might substitute for water and might extend the range of allowable temperatures somewhat. However, nonpolar solvents for life, and silicon based life, appear impossible.
The one thing that is important to remember in determining viability zones is that all of the planets and some of the moons give off their own nuclear heat from fission; especially the earth and other seismically active bodies like Io. This nuclear heat might substitute for solar heat for bodies well outside of the range of their primary's warmth; especially if these alien planets were formed in much closer proximity to a supernova.
The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.
For example, as a person, I get a lot of spam. But almost all of it is going to my old account at the university of california (when I left I started giving the address to anybody who wanted one, for any reason.) However, the addresses I actually use get none.
Which means, yes, that I don't like marketing. In the final analysis, while I agree we can never eradicate the marketing/promotion/advertising sector of our economy, I think that it's clearly bloated and that, more importantly, it is not, as a whole, serving the needs of the larger society.
In particular, it is not good for us to have people observe what we do, and then try and configure our cultural environment, which is a huge part of what constructs our consciousness, as adults as well as as children, in order to get us to part with our money.
I don't want people to find out that I'm an (act surprised) environmentalist, and that start spinning every malarky under the sun as being environmental (Dow-corning hugs trees!) I don't want people tracking my eating habits and advertising junk food when my blood sugar is low. Even if the targeted advertisements aren't 1) lies or 2) promoting an action which is detrimonious to my health or well-being, I don't want them to be tailored in such a fashion that I am less likely to just tune them out.
Why do I care? Because, even though I don't view myself as especially vulnerable to advertisements, my thoughts and ideas can still be affected by the things, and if real scientific cleverness is applied to the question of "how can we find out what sort of ad this demographic group will respond to?", then, well, damn, they'll come up with ads that more people in my cohort will respond to. Even if those ads don't succeed in selling me more stuff, I think that the advertisers will successfully identify things that make those ads poison my thought processes for a longer time.
Let me say also that most justifications that people come up with for having an advertising sector to the economy at all are blatantly self serving.
Actually, they say there that their solution contains about as much energy per gallon as gasoline, but they also say that they are "weight-energy" equivalent.
Yeah, I know, it doesn't make any sense. I just assume that they mean weight-energy equivalent.
which produce 4 moles of H2, or 8 grams of hydrogen
Well, except that you're also burning the sodium borate -
NaB + O2 -> NaBO2 is *very* energetically favorable - much more energetically favorable than the other half reaction
NaBH4 -> NaB + H4
Theoretically, there should be some way to engineer the fuel cell to harness the free energy from that component of the reaction.
And, of course, the previous posters are correct that you can get your water back by harvesting it out of the exhaust.
While everybody is making math errors, let me correct mine.
That should be 11 + 23 + 4 (I don't even *know* where I got 3 and 5 as the atomic masses of B and Na) = 38 grams of NaBH4. Now, assuming that this NaBH4 contains no more energy than 8g of hydrogen - which I'm not at all sure of, I know that Lithium Hydride contains a fuckload more than can be accounted for by it's Hs - than 38 grams of NaBH4 ~ 24 grams of gasoline.
Which, yes, is 2/3rds as dense, not half as dense.
So, at that rate we're looking at 38 + 32 = 70 grams of NaBH4/H20 ~ 24g of gasoline energy. Or, 70 mL this stuff ~ 36 mL gas.
On the other hand, if this stuff contains more energy than 4 H2s, and I think it does, lets say that 38gs of NaBH4 (not counting water) contain as much energy as 38mLs of gas; which is how I interpreted the claim made on the millennium projects page.
So, if that is the case, we're looking at 70gs hcell mix ~ 38gs gasoline; or 70mL hcell mix ~ 57mL gasoline.
Either way it's better than you do with H2 and a hell of a lot easier to store.
Well, according to them it contains about the same amount of energy per gram as gasoline. It's as dense as water (about), while gas is half as dense, so, assuming you don't have to dilute it in order to store it, your tank of sodium borohydrate should be smaller than an equivalent gas tank. However, you're right about the water.
So, every 3+5+4 = 12 grams of sodium borohydrate (1 mole) need 2 * (18) = 36 grams (2 moles) of water. At that rate, you end up with four times the mass, which is over twice the volume, of water and sodium borohydrate together, as you'd need of gasoline.
Re:I like the one about the Afghani guys E-mail
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The Year In Ideas
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Not to worry, they thought of that. That's why they when they calibrated the machine, they had all their subjects wear a cage of starving rats on their face
That is the first genuinely clever and funny thing I've ever read on slashdot. Mod him up!
I dunno, maybe I just never read other people's posts closely enough to catch jokes that refer to more than one thing. I hope the moderators got it.
These report is pure drivel. There is a very interesting report / Rebuttal [umn.edu]from Odlyzko [umn.edu] of University of Minnesota about the growth of the Internet itself. It seems that the numbers banted around is between 400% year and Zero. Second the makers of these reports can't do basic math.
Odlyzko's rebuttal has nothing to do with either the UCLA or Forrester reports. It is a rebuttal of a report by caspian networks which is about traffic/bandwidth, the costs and revenues of IT firms generally, and not about personal usage patterns at all! Caspian networks actually states that interest in the internet is down (UCLA comes to the opposite conclusion) - although I think by this they mean internet shopping, which UCLA agrees is down. Odlyzko doesn't even address that part of the Caspian network's reprot, but is about Caspian's methods of measuring bandwidth usage on internet backbones (I agree with Odlyzko that they're flawed.)
Now, Caspian/Odlyzko are still both fascinating, but the previous post needs to be modded down as offtopic in the worst way.
Which is not to say that I don't have problems with UCLA's report.
The part of their own report which they think is most fascinating (UCLA, pg 18) is total nonsense. Of course people who've been using the internet for less than 1 year are more likely than people who've been using for more than 5 to play games/chat, and less likely to use the internet at work. They're more likely to be children and not have jobs!
Anyway, buried on page 59 of the report is an actually fascinating finding about children's behavior on-line. Children are 30% likely (compared to 10% or so generally) to think that it's easier to meet people on-line than in person. That's a fascinating trend, for those of us interested in how technology impacts human social interactions. It also means that some of those 14 year old girls I've been flirting with on-line probably aren't FBI agents.
I like the one about the Afghani guys E-mail
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The Year In Ideas
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Pardon me while I ramble.
One E-Mail Message Can Change the World struck me as a particular interesting case-in-point (which I hadn't yet heard about because I don't watch opera and live in the cultural backwater that is Manhattan.) Obviously, the code is speech one is more near and dear to all of our slashdotting hearts, but the NYT doesn't have much to say (other than, yes, we've made our case to that reporter's satisfaction) that we haven't heard yet. The one about the afghani guys e-mail raises what really are the interesting questions - since it seems that "commerce" isn't going to choke our medium of culture and communication to shallow and materialistic braindeath - what sorts of things can all our internetworked computers accomplish, and how do they really change things, from the standpoint of culture and communication.
Incidentally, The Lie Detector That Scans Your Brain is utter hogwash. Pseudoscience quackery phrenology revisited crap crap crap. I don't even know where to start. Okay, we're tuning this thing, and we have this guy (under no particular stress) alternately tell the truth and lie. Then, we have this guy, and if he's caught lying his life is destroyed - he spends 15 years in the can - and we compare the activity in the entire brains of these two subjects when they talk, to try and figure out when the really stressed guy is lying. Okay, I'm a bio grad student, but is the problem not obvious? The intense stress alters neurology in the entirety of the brain. The airport security mounted brainscanners are an endearingly dystopic proposition, but are unfortunately totally impractical. You're going to pull people into security based on brain scans taken from them without a background? You're going to train special techs, and then pay them, to stand there and look at the brainscan of every person who enters the airport? You're going to trust a computer to do it? Please.
The reporter who wrote transcending equations obviously has no background in math. I think he read some of the other new york times articles on the proposals of solid state physicists and got confused. Ah well.
The right honorable Mr. Coward wrote:
Phone solicitation is soooo much more annoying. Why don't people enact laws against that.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act was signed by George Sr. in 1991. The link also has some cute advice about how the law applies to you.
Of course, this is in the states - I don't know where Mr. Coward is from.
Anyway, the FCC/FTC/DOJ/park service etc. periodically come by and close down a telemarketer, but it is pretty much for show, and in every case the telemarketer has actually been charged with fraud, not with calling people who've been asked to have their numbers removed. In general, it being the law anyway, telemarketers will take your # off if you ask (unlike spammers.)
Which impact will this discovery have on the recently overhyped global warming debate ?
It will give ammunition to people who, having an interest in not cutting back in CO2 emissions, want to argue that the global warming we've observed recently on earth is a "natural" phenomenon.
Firstly, this isn't an observation of increased temperature on mars. This is an observation of polar CO2 erosion. No temperature increase (which has been observed on earth) has been observed on Mars.
Secondly, we allready knew that climate change occurs periodically and naturally. The fact that Mars may be in the process of exiting a "dry ice age" at the moment indicates nothing about the earth.
Furthermore, I'm going to take common-sense issue with the scientists announcement that this (which they have observed over only 1 yr. martian) is "definitely not a seasonal trend." They can't know that. As an example, the ice sheets could melt in summers and reform every third or fourth winter which hapened to be extra cold. Point is there would be no long term change. I don't see any data on the actual rate at which these ice sheets are eroding, either.
The Earth, on the other hand, is allready warm by recent-meteorological standards (personally, I'm a great fan of the theory that the himalayas caused the ice ages by stripping CO2 out of the atmosphere - Nova did an episode about it.) The rate at which CO2 is going back into the earth's atmosphere is highly unusual given our knowledge of the climatic history of the earth so I don't see how our much-more-limited knowledge of the climate on Mars reveals much.
Speaking of flame wars, I have to resist the impulse to insult the previous poster. This has nothing to do with the ozone layer!
I know that the illiteracy of journalists is now an american tradition but:
Smaller, cheaper and more lethal, the high-powered version of a pocket laser pointer is [...]
means that these battlefield lasers are smaller, cheaper and more lethal (all three of which I doubt) than... a pocket laser pointer. I assume that they mean smaller, cheaper and more lethal than previous generations of killer laser weapons (and even that, I doubt) but this is ridiculous.
Even though these lasers work - which, given how well the same technologies work for telescopes and given the output of an OI laser, I don't really doubt - that doesn't make this automatically a practical technology and it seems clear to me that it's a white elephant for cash starved defense contractors.
Slashdot Mirror
If Jupiter had somehow been lit (by being hit by an object the size of uranus, say - I've been told that would have done it), it would have burned out in the deep, deep precambrian (billions of years ago). It doesn't have five billion years of fuel. While burning in the early stages of earthly development, it would have been about as bright as the moon (of course, the sun at that time was bluer and overall dimmer). Butterfly flaps it's wings in China, I know, but I don't think it would have been enough of a change in the overall radiation level on earth that whatever conditions allowed life to rise on earth wouldn't have been in effect. Given those conditions, you ask - is life likely to arise, or is it a rare event even in the conditions that favor it (over the course of billions of years,) such that a tiny change in conditions could have prevented that one spark of life from occuring? As a molecular biologist with interests in the field of molecular evolution and structural biology, I'm going to say - no, given that conditions that favor the appearance of life (as a chemical phenomenon) it's going to happen.
If Jupiter were more massive - simply igniting it without changing it's mass wouldn't cause it to exert more gravity - well, yeah, all bets are off, since that would imply very different things about the environment under which the entire solar system formed. Although, it just occured to me, Jupiter's core is still undergoing nuclear reactions (so is the earth's core) just not on a stellar scale. I don't see how we'd know if those reactions had been much faster/brighter three billion years ago. We'd have to guess from the amount of heavy hydrogen present in the Jovian atmosphere, and I don't think our measurements (radio spectroscopy? something about Jupiter's magnetic properties?)are precise enough to figure that out.
so they drew it in, right? i can do that too! look, planets!
It is not quite that bad. This link here is really nice. I'm putting in a plug for my old alma-mater (go slugs.)
Yeah, the pictures are pretty (awesome, if real) but I'm going to wait for pictures from the Hubble (which had better be forthcoming!) before I'm totally persuaded.
That said - 58 light years? That's a long trip, but totally possible.
Anyone else feel like this thing was designed by a Focus group? They call in a bunch of modestly tech literate 18-35 yr olds (the target demographic for pricey home theatre equipment) and write down all the things they hear it should do.
"And you should win stuff by watching!" - Millhouse (the Simpsons), Poochy the dog episode
This may explain why color blindness is less prevalent in women, if they start out with
two and lose one they still can see color about as well as a man.
Color blindness is less prevalent in women because the gene that allows color perception is on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes - in order for a woman to be color blind both copies of the gene must be "broken". Same story as hemophilia - the gene that causes blood to clot is on the X chromosome, so if a man gets a single broken copy from his Mom, he has the condition.
with no extra
'regular red' sensitivity I couldn't really distinguish it from a bright red (it is really red, prolly cuz it's
completely undetected by the blue & green receptors.)
Okay, the "near IR" that you can see is part of the spectrum that behaves as "visible" light but which our eyes (mostly) cannot detect. Detecting that light, and calling it red, doesn't do much to disturb your color vision, since, most of the time, that extra "color" shows up alongside regular red light and it doesn't do much.
Now, the deep infra-red, the kind that you need to be able to see to have "heat vision" doesn't have this property. You have cone receptors that see this particular color of light. Now, where in the nervous system are you going to attach them? My point is, there isn't a "fourth color" to attach them to - there is a great deal of complicated graymatter involved in vision processing and you can't just add a whole new set of inputs (well, we still don't know much about how it works but it certainly appears you can't.) Imagine, instead of seeing just R, B, G, R+B = V, R+G = O, and G+B = Y, we'd have to have six new secondary colors, hot Red, hot Blue, hot Green, hot Violet etc., as well as a new primary color (hot Black) and the brain just isn't equipped to cope with that.
You can wire them up just as if they were more red cones; so a hot newspaper looks pink. However, at that rate, the person would have a lot of trouble making any sense of what he or she saw.
Sorry, I meant to say, it would be almost impossible to distinguish IR from ambient heat using a chromophore. Obviously, there are all sorts of organic materials that image IR just fine. My bad. I don't know how snakes do it but I don't think it involves generating an electric potential in a chromophore.
In any case, adding the "pits" that snakes use to sense heat to someone's eyes would be even more difficult.
what would stop
them from changing the spectrum of vision? perhaps adding uv or infrared to the normal visible light
Firstly, such an eye would have very few advantages on a microcamera - in terms of ease of use, it would be much simpler to hide tiny cameras in artificial cavities in someone's body than to do what you're proposing. Furthermore, the nervous system requirements to process the additional information simply are not there (infrared = red and your superspy can't see normal colors? Ooh, sign me up today.)
In order to do what you're proposing, you'd need to take a human eye and genetically modify it so that it could safely detect either infra-red or UV light, problems with that proposal include -
1) The human eye works by converting photons in the visible range into electrical potentials, which then produce nerve impulses. Photons are converted into electrical potentials by chromphores (big, organic molecules with many double bonds.) These chromophores can allready detect UV, but when they do they're destroyed. There's a membrane in the eye that exists purely to screen UV out. So, if you want to be able to see UV, you have to modify all the receptors that are allready in there to resist UV.
2) Genetic modification of these chromophores is exceedingly difficult, since they are not coded for by genes in and of themselves (they are produced by a host of other proteins.) So, you'd need to replace the dozen or so proteins that make a chromophore (in a particular cell, at a particular time) with a dozen or so genes/proteins that make some UV (or IR) sensitive chromophore. Then, you'd need (somehow) to alter all of the proteins that recognised the old chromophore so that they recognise the new chromophore, instead, so that it is properly inserted into the cellular architecture. This sort of technology is, optimistically, a century away, and has many more sinister potential uses than making an organic wide-spectrum camera.
3) It is extremely difficult, using only organic molecules, to distinguish between IR and physical heat. Unlike infrared light, which makes bonds bounce back and forth more quickly (= heat), or ultraviolet light, which cleaves bonds (in addition), visible light has the property of raising the electric potential of "pi" electrons; electrons which participate in a double bond but which are not strictly required for the bond to exist. Note that by this definition "visible" light does extend a little farther in each direction than what we can actually see.
After you've finished your epic feat of genetic and chemical engineering, you need to take your modified cells and insert them into embryos who have had there eyes removed and see if the modified cells still grow into eyeballs. I envy your budget.
My main problem with this is that there are huge, massive problems with Monsanto - a total disregard for safety testing, obsession with secrecy and a tendency to corrupt governments,
It's irresponsible to make that kind of broad accusation without background. Here's some:
Round up ready corn contaminating other crops.
The 60 minutes story about how they covered up the fact that working with PVC monomer melts people's bones. This isn't the best possible link, unfortunately.
Ooh! Here's a whole page dedicated to how wicked monsanto is. You can learn about how Monsanto tried to cover up that fact that DDT was wiping out all the birds in California (yes, the evil corporation is the classic Silent Spring is none other than Monsanto.) They also made agent Orange, which had health effects that they tried to cover up.
Those really interested in the subject of chlorinated organics should read Pandora's Poison. The up-shot is that they are a technolgy which simply isn't safe, and that we should abandon them entirely, especially chlorine based pesticides. The book is highly informative, and also a good introduction for someone who's background is more in, say, computers.
So, the long and the short of it is that this is nothing new. Monsanto has been doing lots of stuff like ever since its inception.
All of what jayed_99 says is true.
However, the original idea with terminator seeds was that they would (I'm not sure how well it works - I gather it doesn't but Monsanto policy seems to be that objective truth is foreign to their religion) produce non-fertilising pollen. So, the seeds that monsanto sells are a hybrid of line A (fertile) and line B (fertile) which produces line C, which they sell, and which doesn't produce fertile pollen OR fertile seeds. In addition to meaning that you can't grow up line C yourself, or make your own lines that include whatever favorable genes where transgenically introduced into line C, this means that line C's pollen can't contaminate non engineered crops nearby, which is a huge problem with other GM foods (pause, looks askance at my Dorito.)
Now, terminator seeds are basically a dead issue because folks like jayed_99 simply refused to buy them.
This means that people are growing up (or being forced to grow up, by cross polination) the GM crops that Monsanto sells without paying for new seeds each time.
So, the next part of Monsanto's evil plan is to make their money selling chemicals (which they also make) instead of the GM crops themselves. Enter roundup ready Corn. You want evil, there's your classic Monsanto evil. The idea is that they can go ahead and give away the GM crops (although they'll continue to charge while they can), because the only thing the GM crops are good for is buying mroe roundup.... from Monsanto.
So, the trend in agro genetic engineering is to do stuff like that. Genetically engineering crops that resist perishability better, or which inherently resist pests, or are more nutritious, may be a losing proposition because the product is a living thing that is not easily controlled. However, genetically engineering pesticide resistance lets you sell more of your pesticide, which is where the big money is, anyway.
Of course, as a medical geneticist, I may have an unfair bias against evil (which seems to be Monsanto's position vis a vis the union of concerned scientists)
[The team] tested out the theory that learning results from a physical change that strengthens the connections between selected neurons. [They showed] how short- and long-term memories result from different physical effects in the brain
They showed physical effects that MAY be responsible for the phenomenon that we call memory. This is very good work, and it shows that these physical effects occur in the brain (there is some possibility that it's an artifact of their method but it's pretty slim.) They also occur on about the right timescale to explain memory. HOWEVER that is NOT sufficient to show that these physical effects are responsible for the phenomenon we call memory, just that they very well could be.
The point at which you call something "proven" can be fairly subjective but in this case we haven't eliminated other potential physical effects that might play some role, possibly a crucial or pivotal one, in actual memory.
As a scientist, I am convinced (just short of certain) that the effects that they've observed play some role in real memory. That doesn't mean that they play the definitive role.
I suspect that the scientists responsible for the research couched there statements in a number of caveats that the reporter simply ignored.
Okay, "slashdot sponsored" is the wrong word. Mediated through slashdot or organised via slashdot, I might say. Intel's adverts on slashdot would probably influence Slashdot's editorial board not to endorse this hypothetical boycott directly, but most of the moderation is done by readers (with no economic interest in slashdot) who certainly wouldn't feel so bound. Also, Slashdot carried this story which is not pro-intel any way you slice it.
Pulling their ads off of slashdot in response to such a boycott (or even threatening to do so) would be PR hari kiri with a rusty knife.
This isn't really a big enough action on Intel's part to justify a general boycott, put in perspective with the actions of other companies with a similar market cap, it's total small fry. It still makes me plenty angry.
Oregon Supreme Court declined to hear my case, leaving standing the unfavorable decision of the Oregon Appeals Court as the final authority
I'm sure merlyn/Mr. Schwartz has allready discussed this with his council, but of course the supreme court can take the case and over-rule the state court, the plaintive cries of certain states rights activitists notwithstanding. That's not going to happen, which basically means we need a political solution.
Individuals in Oregon can contact their governor individually, although such petitions are, unfortunately, unlikely to work.
Some form of organised lobbying - from an oregon based trade organisation of engineers or programmers, mayhap? (I'm a biologist) - might successfully generate a pardon, or at least get the law struck from the books. Certainly, I think it's a legitimate avenue for such an association to act, since the oregon computer crime law (which I can't find under that title but which is somewhere here) obviously opens its membership up to wanton and unjustified prosecution.
Although Intel is likely to announce that it's a criminal trial and Intel cannot drop charges, we could bring pressure to bear on Intel. I only buy AMDs anyway, but a threatened slashdot-sponsored boycott, if everyone on slashdot is as convinced of his fundamental innocence as I am, might scare them a little.
More than likely the poor slob is screwed.
1: H2O is quite light. It's only 18g/mol. There's no other combination _I_ can think of that would be as light, as we humans are made
up of a lot of water.
Water is light, but it is dense (1.) Most organic solvents are density roughly 2/3rds, although they are more compressable than water (so they'd be roughly density 1 under high enough pressure.) Water's gross physical properties (density, viscocity and so forth) are important for a multicellular organism but, actually, if you were just a single alien cell, might not matter.
2: H2O is slightly polar, so it 'sticks' to certain structures a little more. Oil would be an interesting substitute to water, but oil is
large polimer chains. Too hard to create. However Ions would disrupt other chemicals. Also, Ions require water to have charge.
Ions require something polar (alcohol would do) to pair with, or they won't disaccoiate with their counterion. It need not be water - it could be alcohol, or it could be something exotic like liquid SH2. Atoms heavier than sulfur or iodine are insuffiently electronegative to hold much of a negative charge in a polar bond, so probably wouldn't be suitable.
The real problem is that your non-water based cell needs some way to seperate itself from the environment. If you're willing to call any self-replicating molecule "life," this may not be a requirement, but if you're looking for anything that's at least a recognisable organism, even if microscopic, this is a hard requirement to fill without water (or HI or H2S.)
The way cell membranes work is they have an oily portion (the membrane) with ionic stuff on the inside and the outside. So, you have a little bubble of water (the cell) wrapped in the oily membrane which is much like a soap bubble.
Now, in an oily solvent, at the right temperature, you might be able to have the reverse - like a hollow bubble of water floating in liquid soap. However, the forces that push small amounts of something polar out of a non-polar solute are MUCH WEAKER than the forces that push something oily out of water. This results not from an energetic effect, but from an entropic effect:
Water in a solvent state is fairly disordered, capable of forming H-bonds with different waters on all sides of it, and of tumbling around and forming different H-bonds. If you introduce a big oil molecule into the water, there are a number of positions that the water can't tumble into (people describe this as a crystal-like cage but that is inaccurate) so the water molecule becomes more ordered. This increase in order is extremely unfavorable, so all of the oily molecules are pushed out of contact with the water and into oil droplets; like when you mix oil and vinegar together.
The above is called the "hydrophobic effect" and it is the basis of how cells form embranes AND of how proteins become structured. It is pretty much the basis of all life. A similar effect does NOT occur with oily solvents! In fact, it doesn't much occur with ethanol; as far as I know, only other molecules which are much like water show this property.
3: Most of all biological elements are within the top 10 elements on the peridic chart. The reason these are used is because nuclear
fusion within the sun allows these to be made with much greater abundance. This reason also coves why no Earthen creatures use
silicon instead of carbon.
Sorry, that's not true. The earth has more iron atoms on it than carbon atoms, and scads every element through 44 (Nickel). What you say IS true for the outer planets, which didn't have their light elements significantly blasted off by some kind of solar event. Alien planets, which got their heavy elements from different supernovae (that's where heavy elements come from) might have mercury and gold in abundance as well. We don't know.
4: If you can accept the above examples of why water is better than other mostly inert transfer chemicals, then tempature also
comes into play. I know of no animals that use solid or gaseous blood. All use liquid of some type, just because diffusion (or in
water, osmosis) is easier to transport chemicals. The tempature of water being a liquid is between 255K and 310K , so most planets
are eliminated just because of the tempature needs strict control.
I cannot see life arising in solid state, because if the molecules can't move, you can't do the kind of complex molecular recognition chemistry that we understand as life.
In a gaseous state, same problem for reverse reasons - the molecules can't find each other.
That said, you can have pockets of liquid water (underground, say, or under higher pressure) at much higher temperatures. Other molecules with many of the properties of water (possibly enough) could be liquid at much lower temperatures. There is an outside chance that much larger molecules might be suitable and liquid at higher temperatures.
Really exotic solvents - like molten table salt - require temperatures so high that processes dependent on a high degree of order (like life) could never arise.
Another big problem is that complex organic solvents (polybenzenes and such) do not arise spontaneously, while water and amino acids do.
Long story short - a few very water like solvents, like HCl, H2S or HI - might substitute for water and might extend the range of allowable temperatures somewhat. However, nonpolar solvents for life, and silicon based life, appear impossible.
The one thing that is important to remember in determining viability zones is that all of the planets and some of the moons give off their own nuclear heat from fission; especially the earth and other seismically active bodies like Io. This nuclear heat might substitute for solar heat for bodies well outside of the range of their primary's warmth; especially if these alien planets were formed in much closer proximity to a supernova.
The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.
For example, as a person, I get a lot of spam. But almost all of it is going to my old account at the university of california (when I left I started giving the address to anybody who wanted one, for any reason.) However, the addresses I actually use get none.
Which means, yes, that I don't like marketing. In the final analysis, while I agree we can never eradicate the marketing/promotion/advertising sector of our economy, I think that it's clearly bloated and that, more importantly, it is not, as a whole, serving the needs of the larger society.
In particular, it is not good for us to have people observe what we do, and then try and configure our cultural environment, which is a huge part of what constructs our consciousness, as adults as well as as children, in order to get us to part with our money.
I don't want people to find out that I'm an (act surprised) environmentalist, and that start spinning every malarky under the sun as being environmental (Dow-corning hugs trees!) I don't want people tracking my eating habits and advertising junk food when my blood sugar is low. Even if the targeted advertisements aren't 1) lies or 2) promoting an action which is detrimonious to my health or well-being, I don't want them to be tailored in such a fashion that I am less likely to just tune them out.
Why do I care? Because, even though I don't view myself as especially vulnerable to advertisements, my thoughts and ideas can still be affected by the things, and if real scientific cleverness is applied to the question of "how can we find out what sort of ad this demographic group will respond to?", then, well, damn, they'll come up with ads that more people in my cohort will respond to. Even if those ads don't succeed in selling me more stuff, I think that the advertisers will successfully identify things that make those ads poison my thought processes for a longer time.
Let me say also that most justifications that people come up with for having an advertising sector to the economy at all are blatantly self serving.
Actually, they say there that their solution contains about as much energy per gallon as gasoline, but they also say that they are "weight-energy" equivalent.
Yeah, I know, it doesn't make any sense. I just assume that they mean weight-energy equivalent.
which produce 4 moles of H2, or 8 grams of hydrogen
Well, except that you're also burning the sodium borate -
NaB + O2 -> NaBO2 is *very* energetically favorable - much more energetically favorable than the other half reaction
NaBH4 -> NaB + H4
Theoretically, there should be some way to engineer the fuel cell to harness the free energy from that component of the reaction.
And, of course, the previous posters are correct that you can get your water back by harvesting it out of the exhaust.
While everybody is making math errors, let me correct mine.
That should be 11 + 23 + 4 (I don't even *know* where I got 3 and 5 as the atomic masses of B and Na) = 38 grams of NaBH4. Now, assuming that this NaBH4 contains no more energy than 8g of hydrogen - which I'm not at all sure of, I know that Lithium Hydride contains a fuckload more than can be accounted for by it's Hs - than 38 grams of NaBH4 ~ 24 grams of gasoline.
Which, yes, is 2/3rds as dense, not half as dense.
So, at that rate we're looking at 38 + 32 = 70 grams of NaBH4/H20 ~ 24g of gasoline energy. Or, 70 mL this stuff ~ 36 mL gas.
On the other hand, if this stuff contains more energy than 4 H2s, and I think it does, lets say that 38gs of NaBH4 (not counting water) contain as much energy as 38mLs of gas; which is how I interpreted the claim made on the millennium projects page.
So, if that is the case, we're looking at 70gs hcell mix ~ 38gs gasoline; or 70mL hcell mix ~ 57mL gasoline.
Either way it's better than you do with H2 and a hell of a lot easier to store.
Well, according to them it contains about the same amount of energy per gram as gasoline. It's as dense as water (about), while gas is half as dense, so, assuming you don't have to dilute it in order to store it, your tank of sodium borohydrate should be smaller than an equivalent gas tank. However, you're right about the water.
So, every 3+5+4 = 12 grams of sodium borohydrate (1 mole) need 2 * (18) = 36 grams (2 moles) of water. At that rate, you end up with four times the mass, which is over twice the volume, of water and sodium borohydrate together, as you'd need of gasoline.
Not to worry, they thought of that. That's why they when they calibrated the machine, they had all their subjects wear a cage of starving rats on their face
That is the first genuinely clever and funny thing I've ever read on slashdot. Mod him up!
I dunno, maybe I just never read other people's posts closely enough to catch jokes that refer to more than one thing. I hope the moderators got it.
These report is pure drivel. There is a very interesting report / Rebuttal [umn.edu]from Odlyzko [umn.edu] of University of Minnesota about the growth of the Internet itself. It seems that the numbers banted around is between 400% year and Zero. Second the makers of these reports can't do basic math.
Odlyzko's rebuttal has nothing to do with either the UCLA or Forrester reports. It is a rebuttal of a report by caspian networks which is about traffic/bandwidth, the costs and revenues of IT firms generally, and not about personal usage patterns at all! Caspian networks actually states that interest in the internet is down (UCLA comes to the opposite conclusion) - although I think by this they mean internet shopping, which UCLA agrees is down. Odlyzko doesn't even address that part of the Caspian network's reprot, but is about Caspian's methods of measuring bandwidth usage on internet backbones (I agree with Odlyzko that they're flawed.)
Now, Caspian/Odlyzko are still both fascinating, but the previous post needs to be modded down as offtopic in the worst way.
Which is not to say that I don't have problems with UCLA's report.
The part of their own report which they think is most fascinating (UCLA, pg 18) is total nonsense. Of course people who've been using the internet for less than 1 year are more likely than people who've been using for more than 5 to play games/chat, and less likely to use the internet at work. They're more likely to be children and not have jobs!
Anyway, buried on page 59 of the report is an actually fascinating finding about children's behavior on-line. Children are 30% likely (compared to 10% or so generally) to think that it's easier to meet people on-line than in person. That's a fascinating trend, for those of us interested in how technology impacts human social interactions. It also means that some of those 14 year old girls I've been flirting with on-line probably aren't FBI agents.
Pardon me while I ramble.
One E-Mail Message Can Change the World struck me as a particular interesting case-in-point (which I hadn't yet heard about because I don't watch opera and live in the cultural backwater that is Manhattan.) Obviously, the code is speech one is more near and dear to all of our slashdotting hearts, but the NYT doesn't have much to say (other than, yes, we've made our case to that reporter's satisfaction) that we haven't heard yet. The one about the afghani guys e-mail raises what really are the interesting questions - since it seems that "commerce" isn't going to choke our medium of culture and communication to shallow and materialistic braindeath - what sorts of things can all our internetworked computers accomplish, and how do they really change things, from the standpoint of culture and communication.
Incidentally, The Lie Detector That Scans Your Brain is utter hogwash. Pseudoscience quackery phrenology revisited crap crap crap. I don't even know where to start. Okay, we're tuning this thing, and we have this guy (under no particular stress) alternately tell the truth and lie. Then, we have this guy, and if he's caught lying his life is destroyed - he spends 15 years in the can - and we compare the activity in the entire brains of these two subjects when they talk, to try and figure out when the really stressed guy is lying. Okay, I'm a bio grad student, but is the problem not obvious? The intense stress alters neurology in the entirety of the brain. The airport security mounted brainscanners are an endearingly dystopic proposition, but are unfortunately totally impractical. You're going to pull people into security based on brain scans taken from them without a background? You're going to train special techs, and then pay them, to stand there and look at the brainscan of every person who enters the airport? You're going to trust a computer to do it? Please.
The reporter who wrote transcending equations obviously has no background in math. I think he read some of the other new york times articles on the proposals of solid state physicists and got confused. Ah well.
The right honorable Mr. Coward wrote:
Phone solicitation is soooo much more annoying. Why don't people enact laws against that.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act was signed by George Sr. in 1991. The link also has some cute advice about how the law applies to you.
Of course, this is in the states - I don't know where Mr. Coward is from.
Anyway, the FCC/FTC/DOJ/park service etc. periodically come by and close down a telemarketer, but it is pretty much for show, and in every case the telemarketer has actually been charged with fraud, not with calling people who've been asked to have their numbers removed. In general, it being the law anyway, telemarketers will take your # off if you ask (unlike spammers.)
Which impact will this discovery have on the recently overhyped global warming debate ?
It will give ammunition to people who, having an interest in not cutting back in CO2 emissions, want to argue that the global warming we've observed recently on earth is a "natural" phenomenon.
Firstly, this isn't an observation of increased temperature on mars. This is an observation of polar CO2 erosion. No temperature increase (which has been observed on earth) has been observed on Mars.
Secondly, we allready knew that climate change occurs periodically and naturally. The fact that Mars may be in the process of exiting a "dry ice age" at the moment indicates nothing about the earth.
Furthermore, I'm going to take common-sense issue with the scientists announcement that this (which they have observed over only 1 yr. martian) is "definitely not a seasonal trend." They can't know that. As an example, the ice sheets could melt in summers and reform every third or fourth winter which hapened to be extra cold. Point is there would be no long term change. I don't see any data on the actual rate at which these ice sheets are eroding, either.
The Earth, on the other hand, is allready warm by recent-meteorological standards (personally, I'm a great fan of the theory that the himalayas caused the ice ages by stripping CO2 out of the atmosphere - Nova did an episode about it.) The rate at which CO2 is going back into the earth's atmosphere is highly unusual given our knowledge of the climatic history of the earth so I don't see how our much-more-limited knowledge of the climate on Mars reveals much.
Speaking of flame wars, I have to resist the impulse to insult the previous poster. This has nothing to do with the ozone layer!
I know that the illiteracy of journalists is now an american tradition but:
Smaller, cheaper and more lethal, the high-powered version of a pocket laser pointer is [...]
means that these battlefield lasers are smaller, cheaper and more lethal (all three of which I doubt) than... a pocket laser pointer. I assume that they mean smaller, cheaper and more lethal than previous generations of killer laser weapons (and even that, I doubt) but this is ridiculous.
Even though these lasers work - which, given how well the same technologies work for telescopes and given the output of an OI laser, I don't really doubt - that doesn't make this automatically a practical technology and it seems clear to me that it's a white elephant for cash starved defense contractors.
You can find an artists conception of what these robots might look like in action here.
Now that we have these, we finally have a force capable of opposing his accursed dinobots.