There is a lot of poor comic stuff out there. It is an undervalued medium, so the people who do it tend to be a bit off-beat. You get a lot of strange stuff, a lot of experimental stuff, a lot of actually not very good stuff. A lot of web comics are done by people who are developing their style while holding down other jobs. But there are gems. If we have a good peer group that reads comics and appreciates them; and comic book artists just become 'artists', then one day we may get immortal works to sit alongside the great literature on our shelves, if there are still shelves and books. Right now, it is still a bit rough, but they are getting there.
For me, a great comic book will have a depth and a degree of interconnection that it is hard to reproduce with a linear stream of text. It is a bit more like reading an orchestral music score, where you have many time-lines at once. If you find yourself flicking back a page or two to find out who the person in the flat hat is, this is the right way of reading a good comic. If you notice something in the background, and have a nagging feeling you saw something like that before, but didn't take it in at the time, then the authors are playing you like a fish. If you zoom through the thing in ten minutes, then either the thing has no depth, or you've missed it. It is so easy to go too quick, but you have to pace yourself.
There is also a lot of art in how the scene is framed. You may see the people in silhouette, or you may see them drawn is classic cartoon outlines. Is the artist trying to get you into the scene with the protagonists, or giving you a disinterested view from above? What's in the speach bubble, and how are they saying it? There are may different forms of speech bubble to hint at whispering, shouting, voice over telephone, emotional strain and so forth. Somewhere, there is a web site that listed the different Marvel Comics speech balloons: you might be surprised how subtle and nuanced the language of the speech balloon is.
Where to start? Everyone will have their favorites. However, for an all-round holistic experience, I would personally recommend the original 'V', with its crude coloring and cheap-looking paper: it is a much more gritty and awful than the film. For classics, look at Tin Tin and Steve Canyon. Search for webcomics. Dark Horse publishing has a site which gives a section of various books, which is an excellent introduction to the variation in styles.
BTW: I mostly read regular books. Good graphic novels cost too much, and they are gone too fast. But it is a fine and open-ended medium. Have a look at the best. If you can't like it, no big deal: I can't take classical ballet, but others do. Enjoy!
Silver is usually a useful byproduct of lead and zinc mining, It was an important side-product of the Cornish tin industry. The tailings of lead mines can contain significant silver.
Nevertheless. there are regions which do no have the traces of the silver you might expect. The price of silver is not that great: it can dip below three times that of copper. If no-one is offering to rake through their tailings then either (a) they are waiting for a better price or (b) there is nothing there to be had. A simple chemical test - flame spectroscopy would probably be best - would settle the issue one way of the other.
Did you just read the summary, and think "hey - that's good news!". I just did. Then doubt began to set in. What it is actually saying is that industry crapped on so much land, that if we built windmills on it we could power the whole of the US. It does not say that they could afford the windmills, or were going to build them. No power, no windmills, just a huge amount of crapped-on land and some hope. At least, the healing may have started.
The energy is perpetual, so you aren't a fool. Congratulations. However, for as long as it lasts, no-one gets any power out of it. It is just a tiny, fixed current going in a circle giving a small, static magnetic field.
On a smaller scale, consider electrons circling a nucleus. They are waves, and not like little planets orbiting a sun, but some of them are going in circles endlessly. They aren't losing energy because they have to be in one quantum state, or emit or absorb a whole chunk of energy to go to another. They can't slowly leak their orbital energy away and spiral into the nucleus, which is good thing for us as matter as we know it would rapidly cease to exist.
What we have here in our little ring is the same sort of thing, but on a larger scale. You have lots of electrons, all in a stable state. Instead of a few electrons orbiting a single nucleus, you have a lot of outer electrons spread out amongst a lot of nucleii. If you have a stable state, then the loop will enclose an integer number of magnetic flux quanta. The most likely state, and the lowest energy state if there is no applied is to have no persistent current, and zero flux quanta. However, at a finite temperature, it is likely that the system is not in its lowest energy state. Why doesn't the loop let the flux quanta out and drop to the lowest energy state? Well, the quantum maths is a bit tricky, but a rough explanation goes like this...To let the flux go, one part of the ring has to stop conducting at one point and put up a resistance. This will let out the flux quantum and absorb the energy as it goes. While this makes sense from energy terms, there is no reason why one bit of the loop should do it rather than another. The superconducting SQUID devices mentioned in the article are a superconducting loop with a weak point so you can have all sorts of elegant fun with the physics as flux quanta go in and out.
So, this is no use as an energy source, but it could be very useful as a form of memory. Suppose you have a loop of 18 carbon atoms with one hydrogen to each - a bit like benzene but bigger. Like benzine, it has a loop of pi electrons above and beneath, and these electrons can do the same thing. The first energy state (one flux quantum in the loop) is about 0.5 eV above the ground state, so it should be stable at room temperature. You can read the energy state non-destructively by approaching a similar loop with a weak point (a bit like a SQUID, again), or you can destructively blank the state by twisting the ring, destroying the pi delocalization. This is not a new idea - I know it was talked about in the eighties.
I learned the violin a long time ago. I never got very good at it, but I got to talk to a lot of people that were a lot better than me. The general opinion was that above a fairly basic level, a good player could make a good noise out of most instruments. Indeed, there have been blindfold tests using violins made of aluminium or carbon fibre. However, most good players would agree that some instruments are a lot easier and more satisfying to play. This even extends to violin bows, which I find a bit more bizarre.
This makes the blindfold test rather harder to do. The violinist could probably still be blindfolded, and they would probably recognize their own instrument. They might be able to use other senses, such as touch. However, it seems a reasonable thing to try.
It is worth recognizing that the major breakthrough in this work in finding the long-running Framingham Heart Study data. This database had been collected for a different purpose. If this data has been anonymized; if they had destroyed the forrns naming a friend when a new form had been completed; or had destroyed the entire database when the original study aims had been met to preserve the privicy of the individuals, then this work would not have been possible.
This is not to say that all databases are good. We have seen recently how many of our personal details are available of we fly or book a hotel. There are people in the UK who want to make a national register of all children, in the belief that the entire database won't make it out of the building on a memory stick in the first week. But there are details I do not mind contributing to the common good. I would not post my medical details, but I would not mind my medical records being transferred when I move or change doctors, and I would certainly wish people to wring any good that could be wrung from such data. No man is an island, yerknow?
Maybe I am naive and idealistic. Maybe I should be guided by all the grumpy, mean, and suspicious people that seem to fill all London some days. But then again, no - they are all going to get fat and die, aren't they? Hah! Yess!! Roll on the day!!!
They do look like the classical orbitals, don't they?
However, there are some problems with interpreting the image as a photograph of an orbital. What the FEEM does is to charge up a very sharp point. The actual voltage may not be very big, but the local field strength depends on screening and curvature, so you can get very large electrostatic fields around sharp features, and if you get the balance right, electrons will leave the sharp points, zoom down the field lines, and get imaged. I remember seeing a sharp tungsten needle in a FEEM back in the seventies, and seeing the individual atoms. This sort of thing provided the first real evidence of a screw dislocation. You got a strange projection of the tip of the needle, as the electrostatic field tended to map the roughly spherical tip onto a flat plane.
So what is happening here? Our field stripping an electron from the orbital. We are getting a map of the electron flows as focused by the electrostatic field. We calculate the trajectory back through the electrostatic field and guess some sort of map of emission. They must have stripped hundreds or thousands of orbital electrons from the same atom, and replaced them to get each image. However, if an orbital 'pokes out' of the atom, or forms a 'sharp feature' (inverted commas because they are wave functions, so these concepts are a bit hard to define) then we get a bright spot. The really cool bit is getting the atom to go back to the same hybridization state hundreds of times, so we got the two-lobed picture.
It's dead clever. However, for my money, the atomic force probes are cooler as they can measure the fields without stripping the electrons. But, as the reviewer said, it takes all sorts...
Generating heat and hot water using a small plant is not a new suggestion. These sort of things used to be called CHIPS (Central Heating Integrated Power). The new idea is that they can be started up by a remote request.
The typical CHIPs system was suited to hotels. Hotels use and store a lot of hot water. If they have a generator, they can export the power to the grid, and use the hot water, or store it in large insulated tanks until it is needed. The same approach is not really suited to factories that don't need so much hot water, or homes (which are generally too small to offset the expense of the installation, and don't have the scale to store the hot water).
I have no idea where the 92% efficiency figure comes from, though.
I think this was one of the options that were rejected because it had too much effect on the environment. It is known that the rate of carbon fixing by small critters like this is usually throttled by a lack of iron. If you dumped iron salts into the open ocean in quite low concentrations, then they bloomed. However, all sorts of other things bloomed too. I seem to remember in a recent small-scale experiment, krill moved in in large numbers, and spoiled things.
Making the oceans bloom is not necessarily a bad thing. We were worried that there were too few krill a year or so ago. However, as the RS correctly notes, this is the sort of uncontrolled side-effect that can easily lead somewhere nasty. Once you have put the iron salts into the oceans, there is no quick way of turning the process off. Compare this with the cloud-seeing experiment where you could have ships pumping fine sprays of sea-water into the skies to increase cloud cover: That should make white clouds which reflect sunlight back into space, and perhaps increase rain levels. If there turns out to be a side-effect, then you turn the jets off, and in a day or so things should be back to normal.
Okay, suppose we are back in the forties. We have lots of sound and telephone technology. There are tape and wire recorders. We have some early TV technology. There are mechanical calculators and cash registers. You have Hollerith punched cards, Jacquard looms, and the Harringay Tote. How would you set about it? Telephone technology and mercury delay lines were used for early memory, but you had to wait for your bit to arrive back. TV read/write tubes were used to store a small 2D array of dots and re-sample them, but they weren't really RAM yet.
For me, the big missed opportunity was the neon lamp. A neon lamp may take 20 volts to strike, but will run on 5 volts. A neon lamp would store a bit. You could even address a single bulb in a 2D array of them by X and Y buses, and query the state non-destructively, or change its state without affecting the others. Rather than having hundreds of little glass tubes, you might seal a 2D array into a single, flat tube. You would then have an early plasma display (remember the early orange ones in the eighties could store data?). There were calculating valves like the decatron (I remember using those) but, tantalizingly, no large-scale plasma arc logic.
I can see Toonol's worries here. The ovaries contain single cells that ought to grow into a whole being when fertilized. Sometimes, these go wrong, and you get something else. These other things are usually hair, teeth, or occasionally eyes (eeww!). However, you don't get a fingernail or a kidney or a brain. This is probably because hair, teeth and eyes can be 'seeded' from a single cell, where other organs probably develop from a coordinated modification of a set of cells.
This is not to say that there isn't come magic genetic 'sudo' command that allows you to ask for a left kidney, medium size, but we haven't seen any sign of it yet.
What is more likely is that devices like this were never widely known because there was very little that resembled a scientific community, so there was no way to make such knowledge public.
In Greece at the time, quite a lot of what Aristotle and his friends wrote survived. An influential teacher would attract followers, and there was usually the feeling that the 'right answer' could be reached by dialogue, so this is not Science as we know it, Jim, but it does have many of the general properties.
I am not a historian, but I would argue that the Greeks of Athens and Pergamon were a rich society with a leisured class that allowed people to indulge in abstract thought. Philip Ball in "Bright Earth" suggests that Aristotle and the cultured Greeks of his time would have been pretty ignorant of how paints and pigments were made, because that would have been a job for a working man. In Egypt, at the same time, the skilled artisan would have been respected. As a result, the Egyptians documented their pigment recipes, and are known to have made blues, and slivers, and imitation gold.
Ptolomey's Almagest, dated about 150AD, so about the time of this machine, predicted the movements of the planets on an earth-based system using a series of 55 epicycles. You can draw any mad shape with enough epicycles (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw where a system of epicycles draws Homer Simpson). While it is possible that the Almagest was all based on manual calculations, it strongly suggests that there must have been a machine with 55 wheels somewhere to test the calculations.
This leaves me with the guess that a rich Greek shipping merchant employed an Egyptian gear-maker to make a robust and portable version of a machine he may have worked on in Alexandria, suitable for taking on boats. This rich guy and his pals may have looked at the spinning wheels, and said "Hey! Let's get this to predict the date of the Games, too!', and all sorts of almost useless features were stuffed in, because the guy who was paying wanted it. It was the airman's watch of the day.
This is all guesswork. I have no evidence for any of this. But it does seem to fit with the people that were about at the time.
And my dad did say they worked with electronic calculators in 1948, and the history books tell us Pilot-ACE was not demonstrated until 1950.
If you read the comments, there is a hot but pointless discussion on whether this device is actually a 'computer'.
My father worked in RAE Farnbrough in the '40s and '50's. The first early 'Pilot-ACE' prototypes were developed by Manchester University and the National Physical Laboratory. Another less well known one was made for the Ministry of Defence and sent to Farnbrough for calculating things like air flow over wing profiles. The NPL director at the time seems to have had a deep distrust of computers, and the early versions were explicitly forbidden to execute conditional jumps ( IF..THEN..ELSE ). The computer would solve flow equations by shooting from the boundary conditions, and then stop. A human operator then had to press a key to instruct it to execute the jump back to the beginning of the loop to take the next iteration. I can only imagine how irritating Alan Turing must have found that - to go right to the edge of computational completeness, and then stop just short. Aaaaugh!
Arguments about who made the first computer tend to get rabid, fast, so people often define a computer as something that can make a conditions jump based on it's previous calculations, and not just like a player piano, rewinding its roll when it has detected the end. This is a nice, clear rule - either the machine can do conditional jumps or it can't - so it tends to get invoked when things get heated. The Antikythera mechanism had no need of a conditional jump. I have no doubt that the people who made it could have designed it to do so if they had wanted to, just as Charles Babbage could have done for the Difference Engine. However, in both cases, they did not, so in both cases, according to the narrow definition that requires a computer to do a conditional jump, this is a 'calculator' and not a 'computer'.
I suspect the Antikythera mechanism may have had immense value for calculating the tides and the safe dates for shipping. As such, you can imagine the ship's captain chucking it over the side in an emergency, like a U-Boat commander disposing of an Enigma machine, rather than let it be captured, and copied. Maybe this is why these devices have vanished so completely from known history.
If I had a pound for every new state of matter I read about on Slashdot...
They have probably taken a blast of 200 eV X-rays (pretty soft for X-rays, but I have used them for flying-spot radiography) and knocked out a K-shell electron. This leaves the atoms in a state where it takes a little time (femtoseconds) for the electrons to get back and to chuck out the energy. This will probably make the atoms look at bit like silicon - the outer shells will 'see' something a lot like a silicon nucleus - one less proton in the nucleus and one less electron in the K-shell more or less cancels out when viewed from the outside. What we have here is an inverted energy level. You have this state inside every laser. Hardly a new state of matter.
This leads to the cool idea that pumped Aluminium might lase in the UV, and then go reflective, stopping any back-pulse. This sort of thing was considered as an anti-missile 'Star Wars' option. I think they were pumping copper, not aluminium.
I have Windows 2.1 on about 25 3.25" floppies for an Amstrad system of similar age and spec. I don't think Windows 3.0 was out for a while yet. I have no idea whether the disks still read, but they did about twelve years ago when I got the thing to run. I am sure we could copy that to you, if it did not bring down the Wrath of Miscosoft.
If you really want to go Old-School, I have CP/M on 8" floppies also from MIcrosoft. We don't have the machine that ran those any longer, but they did work.
We see a stream of sand dividing up into 'drops'. It has been suggested that these 'drops' of sand are not being held together by internal forces, but by the air currents. The sand is arranging itself into shapes that can fall through the air, and horizontal oscillations of the air may be causing the column to break up into these 'drops'. I am not sure that is wholly the case - the video shows an intriguing 'satellite' droplet after a main one, a lot like you get with liquids.
So, could you get the same effect on Mars? You have less than 1/100th of the pressure, so we might expect the forces from the air to be proportionately weaker. There is also a characteristic length - the mean free path - which is the distance an atmospheric particle will travel before it hits another. If the geometry of what we are looking at - in this case, the sand - goes beneath the mean free path, then the flow changes. There is a dimensionless number called the Knudsden number which describes the point in which this change occurs. The man free path in the earth's atmosphere is about 0.1 micron, so on Mars it will be about 10 microns, which is probably still smaller than sand, so the Knudsden number is still below 1.0. My guess is you may get these 'droplets' on mars, but the effect is a lot weaker ad you would need a much longer drop for the effect to show itself. I hope the people repeat the experiment under vacuum. If you still get the effect in vacuum, then it must be something else.
Powders can behave a lot like liquids provided they keep moving. They can leave tracks that look a lot like liquids. I suspect some of the things we see on Mars may have been formed by powders. However, most of these mechanisms are particles moving over each other under the influence of gravity, and don't really use the atmosphere as the sand may be doing here. However, I started off as a major sceptic on water on Mars, but the evidence of shorelines (which you wouldn't get with powders unless there was something to keep them moving) is beginning to win me over. We shall see.
Here's my usual pet peeve with journalism like this. The motion of powders is a fascinating topic, and it doesn't really need dressing up as the 5th state of matter that baffles scientists. It is not a forgotten topic in science. Fluidized beds are used in industrial chemistry. They tend to be a bit unpredictable, because when they slump, it can be very hard to get them going again, which is what makes them unpredictable.
The Stroop effect is when you read words that are the names of colours, but the letters are coloured differently. You can read out the words with the right eye, but change over to the left eye and you will start saying the colours of the letters and not the words. Both sides of the brain get the same signal, but the nearer side gets it first and tends to jump in with its interpretation, which may not be the one you are wanting.
If you have a voice saying 'high' or 'low' in a high or low voice, then you can get the same thing but with sound. The right ear will hear the words, but the left one can react to the pitch.
I am not sure how this relates to the work of the Institute of Cadging Smokes of Central Italy. If the sound system was turned up, then the user may be lipreading as well as listening, in which case the different delay in the sound and sight by approaching from the 'wrong side' may be more of a factor than what side the speech center is on, or whether they are more suggestible.
We could test this. Apparently some early developing musicians have their speech processing on the other side of the brain. This may impair their ability to describe a logical process, but gives then an enhanced ability to understand complex sounds and emotions. What good it is can be debated, but the flipped speech centers show up on a brain scan. Find one of these people, and see how many cigs you get.
When I read TFA I had a knee-jerk reaction to hate on Airbus, as I believe that everything should have a manual override.
Is a Boeing Jumbo pilot actually steering the plane? They move the yoke and servos move wires and wires move control surfaces. The effort needed to move the surface is encoded and fed back to the yoke. This may not actually envolve encoding the signal or the feedback as digital signals, but this all seems a bit like the arguments on whether you are allowed to use electricity on the Sabbath because it involves fire. Both types of plane involve indirect controls. If you were to actually turn either pane into a manual, then you would not be able to move the yoke at all.
In normal take off and low flight, the AirBus controls ought to be doing very little more than a servo does. It won't (or should not) do anything unexpected unless you are really close to stalling the aircraft, and that only if you have the anti-stall enabled. The pilot at the Paris Air Show turned this off, which resulted in the famous air show crash. If you fly your aircraft really close to stalling speed, and fly it low, it takes longer to pass overhead, and this looks impressive. This is why he did it.
When flying high and level, the plane will be on autopilot. Both planes will be fully automatic. Perhaps the storm had caused the pilots to take the plane out of auto.
Re-read of the article, while thinking how you might generate a deliberate piece of FUD to favor manual controls, I don't know that is what it is. I don't know the author. But it appears to blame the computer system for the crash. It seems to say that the minutes of automatic signals show the computer system had gone out of control. It makes a plea for users to demand to know how their plane is controlled, as though this was being kept a secret. But it stops just short of actually saying any of these things. I wonder of a lawyer has proof-read it.
Watch those knee-jerk reactions. I think we are being manipulated.
I would not have thought it possible to make me feel sorry for Microsoft, but by God, they've done it...
I used to work on patents and other R&D matters for a large company (about 70 000 employees). The general rule was if someone sent you a letter describing a patent or an invention, then you should send it back, if possible unopened. If you read what is in the letter, and anyone, anywhere in your company happens to be working on something that infringes what is described, then your company is now 'knowingly infringing a patent' and the damages (if they win any) are tripled. In 1994 it was also becoming clear that software patents were going to be recognized in the US, which is a huge chunk of the technology market covered by a single patent in English. If you had something that you thought might be patentable, you filed a speculative patent of your own if your company could afford it (my one did). Even if your patent did not stand, you may well prevent anyone absolutely owning anything in the area.
I have also worked for smaller companies where large companies have claimed infringement of some very general patents without evidence, and demanded disclosure of any and all software in the company, so they could troll though and see if they could find anything. We managed to get this patent dismissed. They came up with a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. We were required to read each legal letter, and each letter made us liable to further knowing infringements. In the end, we had to licence a produce we did not use in order to avoid paying ever-increasing patent lawyers costs.
NB: the others in the company didn't tell me we had taken the licence until long after it had been done. I would have fought, but they were probably right. If you are in this position - reply to each letter as briefly as possible. Require them to itemize every case where they think you are infringing before you do any work checking it. Get them to do work and rack up costs where possible. Sit on each letter for a week at least. They may lose interest or look for a softer target.
In 1994, software patents were beginning to look possible. There was a lot of virgin patent territory out there, and some people laid claims to all sorts of things that they could not be said to own. There was no tradition of IP ownership in computing, and it was easy to patent things that could have been found in the library of Alexandria. The company sat on the patents until the idea of a software patent became a bit more solid, and then went to the biggest company they could find. Microsoft must get a lot of gold-diggers like these, and they cannot afford a patent lawyer for each. Their mistake was to talk to the company in the first place, though like my case of returning a letter unopened, it is hard to know what you ought to do until it is too late.
I think things are taking their natural course. Microsoft have probably saved money by not dealing with each gold-digger individually. This strategy means they have to deal with every one that makes it through to the final round without going bust. In the end, all software patent issues seem to be about spending money in legal fees. I have seen software patent battles from both sides, and the person with the deepest pockets always wins. Patents have their place, but they are restrictive rulings which take rights from everyone else when they grant the patent to an individual. This is something we should do sparingly where there is real need. In my opinion, there never was any need for software patents.
The article is pretty unhelpful. However, it is possible to create very shirt-lived dense versions of light elements by replacing the electrons with pi-mesons. A pi-meson is a muon with the same charge as an electron but 500 times the mass. The meson orbits are therefore a lot closer.
Why does this help? Well the nucleus of an atom is pretty tiny when compared to the electron orbits. Rutherford, I think it was, called it "a fly in a cathedral". If you are attempting fusion, you try and pile one atom into another. As the two atoms meet, their electron orbitals overlap and repel. This repulsion will probably cause one atom to bounce off another obliquely long before the nucleii get close. Replace the electrons with pi-mesons and you can get the nucleii a lot closer before the orbitals start to overlap.
Unfortunately, the pi-mesons do not last very long (about 26 nanoseconds), so you have to be continuously making the things. The mesons are not consumed in the fusion reaction, so you can use them again, which is why this is called meson (or muon) catalyzed fusion. Each meson will have to be used several hundred times with different deuterium or tritium atoms if you want to generate energy. It is a bit of a loony idea but the physics is plausible. There's lots of articles out there if you want to know more.
Is this article about meson catalyzed fusion? It is impossible to say.
We do not know that this chirality comes from life. People have presented this as evidence that life exists in space, that life was seeded from space, and all sorts of other stuff. All we actually seem to know is that some stuff out there shows a handedness. If your light is passing through chiral material in space it will pick up a polarization.
This is not to say that this is not a test. If we find a star with planets, and one of the planets reflects more of one circular polarization than the other, then whatever it is that was doing it is probably on or about that planet. A good start would be to see whether we can pick out earth from space this way. I think they are planning to do just that.
I think 'pathalogical' is a fair term in this context. It may sound dramatic, if you are thinking of diseases or ballistics or other stuff of TV drama.
Let's take a undramatic example. Some people are short and some people are tall. If you drew a graph of the heights of people in your district of a certain age and sex, you might well get the classical 'bell' curve. The tall people are not 'ill', just a bit above the norm, that's all.
You might, however, come across some person who are unusually tall and also seem to share other symptoms. They may have large hands, feet, nose, ears, chins and foreheads. They may suffer from headaches or other disorders. They strike you as being somehow different from the 'ordinary tall people'. You may wonder whether they are 'pathalogically tall' which suggests that there is something 'wrong' with this bunch of people.
In my example, the 'pathalogically tall' people have a condition called 'acromegaly'. First, the syndrome was identified; then they had theories about what was causing it; and then they attempted a cure; and now it is in the textbooks.
This investigation is much younger. We all have met peole who have at some point in their lives spent too much time in a darkened room pushing buttons on a computer game like some lab rat. These people may be just outliers on a bell curve: people who may be more bored or less outdoors-ish or less sociable, or who just happen to have found a game that matches their mood. The paper suggests that there are a class of gamers that might usefully be termed 'pathalogical' on statistical terms, not just because they are statistical outliers, but because they may share other symptoms.
Basically, it's just a bit of science happening as it should. No dramatic revelations that gaming addiction is caused by niobium in the soil, or cured by omega-6, or anything. A bit dull, really, but that is probably a sign that it is being done right.
The 'hosepiping' usually happens over a longer distances. It is needed if you want to try and hit an incoming missile at a few kilometers. However, the squiggling beams in 'Ghostbusters' did have the right sort of motion, and protons are lighter than other ions and more easily scattered...
Well, well, well. Thanks for that. I wonder if they knew someone in the military, or maybe they just made the beams squiggle because that's what electric arcs do.
Normally the refractive index of a material is quoted as a constant. However, light radiation will slightly distort the electron levels of the material they are passing through, and this will have effect the refractive index. Normally this effect is very tiny. However, if you design high-power lasers, then it can become a nuisance. If you have a bright spot to your beam, then this will locally raise the refractive index. This will, in turn, cause the light to come to a line focus, which raises the intensity even more. If you do not design high-power optics to account for this, then a flat, uniform beam of light can spontaneously divide into a set of filamentary hot spots, which can smash your expensive optics.
There is another process, more usually associated with high-power ion beams. An ion beam that travels a long distance in air can twist like a garden hose squirting water. The ion beam heats up the air it is passing through, which creates a kind of pipe through the air as the hot atoms move away. This is a nuisance if you want to make the beam go in a straight line. One way of keeping an ion-beam weapon firing straight is to put a laser pre-pulse to heat a straight line through the air for the ion beam to travel down.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of poor comic stuff out there. It is an undervalued medium, so the people who do it tend to be a bit off-beat. You get a lot of strange stuff, a lot of experimental stuff, a lot of actually not very good stuff. A lot of web comics are done by people who are developing their style while holding down other jobs. But there are gems. If we have a good peer group that reads comics and appreciates them; and comic book artists just become 'artists', then one day we may get immortal works to sit alongside the great literature on our shelves, if there are still shelves and books. Right now, it is still a bit rough, but they are getting there.
For me, a great comic book will have a depth and a degree of interconnection that it is hard to reproduce with a linear stream of text. It is a bit more like reading an orchestral music score, where you have many time-lines at once. If you find yourself flicking back a page or two to find out who the person in the flat hat is, this is the right way of reading a good comic. If you notice something in the background, and have a nagging feeling you saw something like that before, but didn't take it in at the time, then the authors are playing you like a fish. If you zoom through the thing in ten minutes, then either the thing has no depth, or you've missed it. It is so easy to go too quick, but you have to pace yourself.
There is also a lot of art in how the scene is framed. You may see the people in silhouette, or you may see them drawn is classic cartoon outlines. Is the artist trying to get you into the scene with the protagonists, or giving you a disinterested view from above? What's in the speach bubble, and how are they saying it? There are may different forms of speech bubble to hint at whispering, shouting, voice over telephone, emotional strain and so forth. Somewhere, there is a web site that listed the different Marvel Comics speech balloons: you might be surprised how subtle and nuanced the language of the speech balloon is.
Where to start? Everyone will have their favorites. However, for an all-round holistic experience, I would personally recommend the original 'V', with its crude coloring and cheap-looking paper: it is a much more gritty and awful than the film. For classics, look at Tin Tin and Steve Canyon. Search for webcomics. Dark Horse publishing has a site which gives a section of various books, which is an excellent introduction to the variation in styles.
BTW: I mostly read regular books. Good graphic novels cost too much, and they are gone too fast. But it is a fine and open-ended medium. Have a look at the best. If you can't like it, no big deal: I can't take classical ballet, but others do. Enjoy!
Silver is usually a useful byproduct of lead and zinc mining, It was an important side-product of the Cornish tin industry. The tailings of lead mines can contain significant silver.
Nevertheless. there are regions which do no have the traces of the silver you might expect. The price of silver is not that great: it can dip below three times that of copper. If no-one is offering to rake through their tailings then either (a) they are waiting for a better price or (b) there is nothing there to be had. A simple chemical test - flame spectroscopy would probably be best - would settle the issue one way of the other.
Does anyone have the figures?
Did you just read the summary, and think "hey - that's good news!". I just did. Then doubt began to set in. What it is actually saying is that industry crapped on so much land, that if we built windmills on it we could power the whole of the US. It does not say that they could afford the windmills, or were going to build them. No power, no windmills, just a huge amount of crapped-on land and some hope. At least, the healing may have started.
The energy is perpetual, so you aren't a fool. Congratulations. However, for as long as it lasts, no-one gets any power out of it. It is just a tiny, fixed current going in a circle giving a small, static magnetic field.
On a smaller scale, consider electrons circling a nucleus. They are waves, and not like little planets orbiting a sun, but some of them are going in circles endlessly. They aren't losing energy because they have to be in one quantum state, or emit or absorb a whole chunk of energy to go to another. They can't slowly leak their orbital energy away and spiral into the nucleus, which is good thing for us as matter as we know it would rapidly cease to exist.
What we have here in our little ring is the same sort of thing, but on a larger scale. You have lots of electrons, all in a stable state. Instead of a few electrons orbiting a single nucleus, you have a lot of outer electrons spread out amongst a lot of nucleii. If you have a stable state, then the loop will enclose an integer number of magnetic flux quanta. The most likely state, and the lowest energy state if there is no applied is to have no persistent current, and zero flux quanta. However, at a finite temperature, it is likely that the system is not in its lowest energy state. Why doesn't the loop let the flux quanta out and drop to the lowest energy state? Well, the quantum maths is a bit tricky, but a rough explanation goes like this...To let the flux go, one part of the ring has to stop conducting at one point and put up a resistance. This will let out the flux quantum and absorb the energy as it goes. While this makes sense from energy terms, there is no reason why one bit of the loop should do it rather than another. The superconducting SQUID devices mentioned in the article are a superconducting loop with a weak point so you can have all sorts of elegant fun with the physics as flux quanta go in and out.
So, this is no use as an energy source, but it could be very useful as a form of memory. Suppose you have a loop of 18 carbon atoms with one hydrogen to each - a bit like benzene but bigger. Like benzine, it has a loop of pi electrons above and beneath, and these electrons can do the same thing. The first energy state (one flux quantum in the loop) is about 0.5 eV above the ground state, so it should be stable at room temperature. You can read the energy state non-destructively by approaching a similar loop with a weak point (a bit like a SQUID, again), or you can destructively blank the state by twisting the ring, destroying the pi delocalization. This is not a new idea - I know it was talked about in the eighties.
I learned the violin a long time ago. I never got very good at it, but I got to talk to a lot of people that were a lot better than me. The general opinion was that above a fairly basic level, a good player could make a good noise out of most instruments. Indeed, there have been blindfold tests using violins made of aluminium or carbon fibre. However, most good players would agree that some instruments are a lot easier and more satisfying to play. This even extends to violin bows, which I find a bit more bizarre.
This makes the blindfold test rather harder to do. The violinist could probably still be blindfolded, and they would probably recognize their own instrument. They might be able to use other senses, such as touch. However, it seems a reasonable thing to try.
It is worth recognizing that the major breakthrough in this work in finding the long-running Framingham Heart Study data. This database had been collected for a different purpose. If this data has been anonymized; if they had destroyed the forrns naming a friend when a new form had been completed; or had destroyed the entire database when the original study aims had been met to preserve the privicy of the individuals, then this work would not have been possible.
This is not to say that all databases are good. We have seen recently how many of our personal details are available of we fly or book a hotel. There are people in the UK who want to make a national register of all children, in the belief that the entire database won't make it out of the building on a memory stick in the first week. But there are details I do not mind contributing to the common good. I would not post my medical details, but I would not mind my medical records being transferred when I move or change doctors, and I would certainly wish people to wring any good that could be wrung from such data. No man is an island, yerknow?
Maybe I am naive and idealistic. Maybe I should be guided by all the grumpy, mean, and suspicious people that seem to fill all London some days. But then again, no - they are all going to get fat and die, aren't they? Hah! Yess!! Roll on the day!!!
They do look like the classical orbitals, don't they?
However, there are some problems with interpreting the image as a photograph of an orbital. What the FEEM does is to charge up a very sharp point. The actual voltage may not be very big, but the local field strength depends on screening and curvature, so you can get very large electrostatic fields around sharp features, and if you get the balance right, electrons will leave the sharp points, zoom down the field lines, and get imaged. I remember seeing a sharp tungsten needle in a FEEM back in the seventies, and seeing the individual atoms. This sort of thing provided the first real evidence of a screw dislocation. You got a strange projection of the tip of the needle, as the electrostatic field tended to map the roughly spherical tip onto a flat plane.
So what is happening here? Our field stripping an electron from the orbital. We are getting a map of the electron flows as focused by the electrostatic field. We calculate the trajectory back through the electrostatic field and guess some sort of map of emission. They must have stripped hundreds or thousands of orbital electrons from the same atom, and replaced them to get each image. However, if an orbital 'pokes out' of the atom, or forms a 'sharp feature' (inverted commas because they are wave functions, so these concepts are a bit hard to define) then we get a bright spot. The really cool bit is getting the atom to go back to the same hybridization state hundreds of times, so we got the two-lobed picture.
It's dead clever. However, for my money, the atomic force probes are cooler as they can measure the fields without stripping the electrons. But, as the reviewer said, it takes all sorts...
Generating heat and hot water using a small plant is not a new suggestion. These sort of things used to be called CHIPS (Central Heating Integrated Power). The new idea is that they can be started up by a remote request.
The typical CHIPs system was suited to hotels. Hotels use and store a lot of hot water. If they have a generator, they can export the power to the grid, and use the hot water, or store it in large insulated tanks until it is needed. The same approach is not really suited to factories that don't need so much hot water, or homes (which are generally too small to offset the expense of the installation, and don't have the scale to store the hot water).
I have no idea where the 92% efficiency figure comes from, though.
I think this was one of the options that were rejected because it had too much effect on the environment. It is known that the rate of carbon fixing by small critters like this is usually throttled by a lack of iron. If you dumped iron salts into the open ocean in quite low concentrations, then they bloomed. However, all sorts of other things bloomed too. I seem to remember in a recent small-scale experiment, krill moved in in large numbers, and spoiled things.
Making the oceans bloom is not necessarily a bad thing. We were worried that there were too few krill a year or so ago. However, as the RS correctly notes, this is the sort of uncontrolled side-effect that can easily lead somewhere nasty. Once you have put the iron salts into the oceans, there is no quick way of turning the process off. Compare this with the cloud-seeing experiment where you could have ships pumping fine sprays of sea-water into the skies to increase cloud cover: That should make white clouds which reflect sunlight back into space, and perhaps increase rain levels. If there turns out to be a side-effect, then you turn the jets off, and in a day or so things should be back to normal.
Now, that's something you didn't see on the BBC.
Okay, suppose we are back in the forties. We have lots of sound and telephone technology. There are tape and wire recorders. We have some early TV technology. There are mechanical calculators and cash registers. You have Hollerith punched cards, Jacquard looms, and the Harringay Tote. How would you set about it? Telephone technology and mercury delay lines were used for early memory, but you had to wait for your bit to arrive back. TV read/write tubes were used to store a small 2D array of dots and re-sample them, but they weren't really RAM yet.
For me, the big missed opportunity was the neon lamp. A neon lamp may take 20 volts to strike, but will run on 5 volts. A neon lamp would store a bit. You could even address a single bulb in a 2D array of them by X and Y buses, and query the state non-destructively, or change its state without affecting the others. Rather than having hundreds of little glass tubes, you might seal a 2D array into a single, flat tube. You would then have an early plasma display (remember the early orange ones in the eighties could store data?). There were calculating valves like the decatron (I remember using those) but, tantalizingly, no large-scale plasma arc logic.
What would you do?
I can see Toonol's worries here. The ovaries contain single cells that ought to grow into a whole being when fertilized. Sometimes, these go wrong, and you get something else. These other things are usually hair, teeth, or occasionally eyes (eeww!). However, you don't get a fingernail or a kidney or a brain. This is probably because hair, teeth and eyes can be 'seeded' from a single cell, where other organs probably develop from a coordinated modification of a set of cells.
This is not to say that there isn't come magic genetic 'sudo' command that allows you to ask for a left kidney, medium size, but we haven't seen any sign of it yet.
What is more likely is that devices like this were never widely known because there was very little that resembled a scientific community, so there was no way to make such knowledge public.
In Greece at the time, quite a lot of what Aristotle and his friends wrote survived. An influential teacher would attract followers, and there was usually the feeling that the 'right answer' could be reached by dialogue, so this is not Science as we know it, Jim, but it does have many of the general properties.
I am not a historian, but I would argue that the Greeks of Athens and Pergamon were a rich society with a leisured class that allowed people to indulge in abstract thought. Philip Ball in "Bright Earth" suggests that Aristotle and the cultured Greeks of his time would have been pretty ignorant of how paints and pigments were made, because that would have been a job for a working man. In Egypt, at the same time, the skilled artisan would have been respected. As a result, the Egyptians documented their pigment recipes, and are known to have made blues, and slivers, and imitation gold.
Ptolomey's Almagest, dated about 150AD, so about the time of this machine, predicted the movements of the planets on an earth-based system using a series of 55 epicycles. You can draw any mad shape with enough epicycles (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw where a system of epicycles draws Homer Simpson). While it is possible that the Almagest was all based on manual calculations, it strongly suggests that there must have been a machine with 55 wheels somewhere to test the calculations.
This leaves me with the guess that a rich Greek shipping merchant employed an Egyptian gear-maker to make a robust and portable version of a machine he may have worked on in Alexandria, suitable for taking on boats. This rich guy and his pals may have looked at the spinning wheels, and said "Hey! Let's get this to predict the date of the Games, too!', and all sorts of almost useless features were stuffed in, because the guy who was paying wanted it. It was the airman's watch of the day.
This is all guesswork. I have no evidence for any of this. But it does seem to fit with the people that were about at the time.
And my dad did say they worked with electronic calculators in 1948, and the history books tell us Pilot-ACE was not demonstrated until 1950.
If you read the comments, there is a hot but pointless discussion on whether this device is actually a 'computer'.
My father worked in RAE Farnbrough in the '40s and '50's. The first early 'Pilot-ACE' prototypes were developed by Manchester University and the National Physical Laboratory. Another less well known one was made for the Ministry of Defence and sent to Farnbrough for calculating things like air flow over wing profiles. The NPL director at the time seems to have had a deep distrust of computers, and the early versions were explicitly forbidden to execute conditional jumps ( IF..THEN..ELSE ). The computer would solve flow equations by shooting from the boundary conditions, and then stop. A human operator then had to press a key to instruct it to execute the jump back to the beginning of the loop to take the next iteration. I can only imagine how irritating Alan Turing must have found that - to go right to the edge of computational completeness, and then stop just short. Aaaaugh!
Arguments about who made the first computer tend to get rabid, fast, so people often define a computer as something that can make a conditions jump based on it's previous calculations, and not just like a player piano, rewinding its roll when it has detected the end. This is a nice, clear rule - either the machine can do conditional jumps or it can't - so it tends to get invoked when things get heated. The Antikythera mechanism had no need of a conditional jump. I have no doubt that the people who made it could have designed it to do so if they had wanted to, just as Charles Babbage could have done for the Difference Engine. However, in both cases, they did not, so in both cases, according to the narrow definition that requires a computer to do a conditional jump, this is a 'calculator' and not a 'computer'.
I suspect the Antikythera mechanism may have had immense value for calculating the tides and the safe dates for shipping. As such, you can imagine the ship's captain chucking it over the side in an emergency, like a U-Boat commander disposing of an Enigma machine, rather than let it be captured, and copied. Maybe this is why these devices have vanished so completely from known history.
If I had a pound for every new state of matter I read about on Slashdot...
They have probably taken a blast of 200 eV X-rays (pretty soft for X-rays, but I have used them for flying-spot radiography) and knocked out a K-shell electron. This leaves the atoms in a state where it takes a little time (femtoseconds) for the electrons to get back and to chuck out the energy. This will probably make the atoms look at bit like silicon - the outer shells will 'see' something a lot like a silicon nucleus - one less proton in the nucleus and one less electron in the K-shell more or less cancels out when viewed from the outside. What we have here is an inverted energy level. You have this state inside every laser. Hardly a new state of matter.
This leads to the cool idea that pumped Aluminium might lase in the UV, and then go reflective, stopping any back-pulse. This sort of thing was considered as an anti-missile 'Star Wars' option. I think they were pumping copper, not aluminium.
I have Windows 2.1 on about 25 3.25" floppies for an Amstrad system of similar age and spec. I don't think Windows 3.0 was out for a while yet. I have no idea whether the disks still read, but they did about twelve years ago when I got the thing to run. I am sure we could copy that to you, if it did not bring down the Wrath of Miscosoft.
If you really want to go Old-School, I have CP/M on 8" floppies also from MIcrosoft. We don't have the machine that ran those any longer, but they did work.
We see a stream of sand dividing up into 'drops'. It has been suggested that these 'drops' of sand are not being held together by internal forces, but by the air currents. The sand is arranging itself into shapes that can fall through the air, and horizontal oscillations of the air may be causing the column to break up into these 'drops'. I am not sure that is wholly the case - the video shows an intriguing 'satellite' droplet after a main one, a lot like you get with liquids.
So, could you get the same effect on Mars? You have less than 1/100th of the pressure, so we might expect the forces from the air to be proportionately weaker. There is also a characteristic length - the mean free path - which is the distance an atmospheric particle will travel before it hits another. If the geometry of what we are looking at - in this case, the sand - goes beneath the mean free path, then the flow changes. There is a dimensionless number called the Knudsden number which describes the point in which this change occurs. The man free path in the earth's atmosphere is about 0.1 micron, so on Mars it will be about 10 microns, which is probably still smaller than sand, so the Knudsden number is still below 1.0. My guess is you may get these 'droplets' on mars, but the effect is a lot weaker ad you would need a much longer drop for the effect to show itself. I hope the people repeat the experiment under vacuum. If you still get the effect in vacuum, then it must be something else.
Powders can behave a lot like liquids provided they keep moving. They can leave tracks that look a lot like liquids. I suspect some of the things we see on Mars may have been formed by powders. However, most of these mechanisms are particles moving over each other under the influence of gravity, and don't really use the atmosphere as the sand may be doing here. However, I started off as a major sceptic on water on Mars, but the evidence of shorelines (which you wouldn't get with powders unless there was something to keep them moving) is beginning to win me over. We shall see.
Here's my usual pet peeve with journalism like this. The motion of powders is a fascinating topic, and it doesn't really need dressing up as the 5th state of matter that baffles scientists. It is not a forgotten topic in science. Fluidized beds are used in industrial chemistry. They tend to be a bit unpredictable, because when they slump, it can be very hard to get them going again, which is what makes them unpredictable.
The Stroop effect is when you read words that are the names of colours, but the letters are coloured differently. You can read out the words with the right eye, but change over to the left eye and you will start saying the colours of the letters and not the words. Both sides of the brain get the same signal, but the nearer side gets it first and tends to jump in with its interpretation, which may not be the one you are wanting.
If you have a voice saying 'high' or 'low' in a high or low voice, then you can get the same thing but with sound. The right ear will hear the words, but the left one can react to the pitch.
I am not sure how this relates to the work of the Institute of Cadging Smokes of Central Italy. If the sound system was turned up, then the user may be lipreading as well as listening, in which case the different delay in the sound and sight by approaching from the 'wrong side' may be more of a factor than what side the speech center is on, or whether they are more suggestible.
We could test this. Apparently some early developing musicians have their speech processing on the other side of the brain. This may impair their ability to describe a logical process, but gives then an enhanced ability to understand complex sounds and emotions. What good it is can be debated, but the flipped speech centers show up on a brain scan. Find one of these people, and see how many cigs you get.
When I read TFA I had a knee-jerk reaction to hate on Airbus, as I believe that everything should have a manual override.
Is a Boeing Jumbo pilot actually steering the plane? They move the yoke and servos move wires and wires move control surfaces. The effort needed to move the surface is encoded and fed back to the yoke. This may not actually envolve encoding the signal or the feedback as digital signals, but this all seems a bit like the arguments on whether you are allowed to use electricity on the Sabbath because it involves fire. Both types of plane involve indirect controls. If you were to actually turn either pane into a manual, then you would not be able to move the yoke at all.
In normal take off and low flight, the AirBus controls ought to be doing very little more than a servo does. It won't (or should not) do anything unexpected unless you are really close to stalling the aircraft, and that only if you have the anti-stall enabled. The pilot at the Paris Air Show turned this off, which resulted in the famous air show crash. If you fly your aircraft really close to stalling speed, and fly it low, it takes longer to pass overhead, and this looks impressive. This is why he did it.
When flying high and level, the plane will be on autopilot. Both planes will be fully automatic. Perhaps the storm had caused the pilots to take the plane out of auto.
Re-read of the article, while thinking how you might generate a deliberate piece of FUD to favor manual controls, I don't know that is what it is. I don't know the author. But it appears to blame the computer system for the crash. It seems to say that the minutes of automatic signals show the computer system had gone out of control. It makes a plea for users to demand to know how their plane is controlled, as though this was being kept a secret. But it stops just short of actually saying any of these things. I wonder of a lawyer has proof-read it.
Watch those knee-jerk reactions. I think we are being manipulated.
I would not have thought it possible to make me feel sorry for Microsoft, but by God, they've done it...
I used to work on patents and other R&D matters for a large company (about 70 000 employees). The general rule was if someone sent you a letter describing a patent or an invention, then you should send it back, if possible unopened. If you read what is in the letter, and anyone, anywhere in your company happens to be working on something that infringes what is described, then your company is now 'knowingly infringing a patent' and the damages (if they win any) are tripled. In 1994 it was also becoming clear that software patents were going to be recognized in the US, which is a huge chunk of the technology market covered by a single patent in English. If you had something that you thought might be patentable, you filed a speculative patent of your own if your company could afford it (my one did). Even if your patent did not stand, you may well prevent anyone absolutely owning anything in the area.
I have also worked for smaller companies where large companies have claimed infringement of some very general patents without evidence, and demanded disclosure of any and all software in the company, so they could troll though and see if they could find anything. We managed to get this patent dismissed. They came up with a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. We were required to read each legal letter, and each letter made us liable to further knowing infringements. In the end, we had to licence a produce we did not use in order to avoid paying ever-increasing patent lawyers costs.
NB: the others in the company didn't tell me we had taken the licence until long after it had been done. I would have fought, but they were probably right. If you are in this position - reply to each letter as briefly as possible. Require them to itemize every case where they think you are infringing before you do any work checking it. Get them to do work and rack up costs where possible. Sit on each letter for a week at least. They may lose interest or look for a softer target.
In 1994, software patents were beginning to look possible. There was a lot of virgin patent territory out there, and some people laid claims to all sorts of things that they could not be said to own. There was no tradition of IP ownership in computing, and it was easy to patent things that could have been found in the library of Alexandria. The company sat on the patents until the idea of a software patent became a bit more solid, and then went to the biggest company they could find. Microsoft must get a lot of gold-diggers like these, and they cannot afford a patent lawyer for each. Their mistake was to talk to the company in the first place, though like my case of returning a letter unopened, it is hard to know what you ought to do until it is too late.
I think things are taking their natural course. Microsoft have probably saved money by not dealing with each gold-digger individually. This strategy means they have to deal with every one that makes it through to the final round without going bust. In the end, all software patent issues seem to be about spending money in legal fees. I have seen software patent battles from both sides, and the person with the deepest pockets always wins. Patents have their place, but they are restrictive rulings which take rights from everyone else when they grant the patent to an individual. This is something we should do sparingly where there is real need. In my opinion, there never was any need for software patents.
The article is pretty unhelpful. However, it is possible to create very shirt-lived dense versions of light elements by replacing the electrons with pi-mesons. A pi-meson is a muon with the same charge as an electron but 500 times the mass. The meson orbits are therefore a lot closer.
Why does this help? Well the nucleus of an atom is pretty tiny when compared to the electron orbits. Rutherford, I think it was, called it "a fly in a cathedral". If you are attempting fusion, you try and pile one atom into another. As the two atoms meet, their electron orbitals overlap and repel. This repulsion will probably cause one atom to bounce off another obliquely long before the nucleii get close. Replace the electrons with pi-mesons and you can get the nucleii a lot closer before the orbitals start to overlap.
Unfortunately, the pi-mesons do not last very long (about 26 nanoseconds), so you have to be continuously making the things. The mesons are not consumed in the fusion reaction, so you can use them again, which is why this is called meson (or muon) catalyzed fusion. Each meson will have to be used several hundred times with different deuterium or tritium atoms if you want to generate energy. It is a bit of a loony idea but the physics is plausible. There's lots of articles out there if you want to know more.
Is this article about meson catalyzed fusion? It is impossible to say.
Material from space has already been shown to exhibit chirality. There's quite a nice review on...
http://scienceandreason.blogspot.com/2009/04/amino-acid-chirality.html
We do not know that this chirality comes from life. People have presented this as evidence that life exists in space, that life was seeded from space, and all sorts of other stuff. All we actually seem to know is that some stuff out there shows a handedness. If your light is passing through chiral material in space it will pick up a polarization.
This is not to say that this is not a test. If we find a star with planets, and one of the planets reflects more of one circular polarization than the other, then whatever it is that was doing it is probably on or about that planet. A good start would be to see whether we can pick out earth from space this way. I think they are planning to do just that.
I think 'pathalogical' is a fair term in this context. It may sound dramatic, if you are thinking of diseases or ballistics or other stuff of TV drama.
Let's take a undramatic example. Some people are short and some people are tall. If you drew a graph of the heights of people in your district of a certain age and sex, you might well get the classical 'bell' curve. The tall people are not 'ill', just a bit above the norm, that's all.
You might, however, come across some person who are unusually tall and also seem to share other symptoms. They may have large hands, feet, nose, ears, chins and foreheads. They may suffer from headaches or other disorders. They strike you as being somehow different from the 'ordinary tall people'. You may wonder whether they are 'pathalogically tall' which suggests that there is something 'wrong' with this bunch of people.
In my example, the 'pathalogically tall' people have a condition called 'acromegaly'. First, the syndrome was identified; then they had theories about what was causing it; and then they attempted a cure; and now it is in the textbooks.
This investigation is much younger. We all have met peole who have at some point in their lives spent too much time in a darkened room pushing buttons on a computer game like some lab rat. These people may be just outliers on a bell curve: people who may be more bored or less outdoors-ish or less sociable, or who just happen to have found a game that matches their mood. The paper suggests that there are a class of gamers that might usefully be termed 'pathalogical' on statistical terms, not just because they are statistical outliers, but because they may share other symptoms.
Basically, it's just a bit of science happening as it should. No dramatic revelations that gaming addiction is caused by niobium in the soil, or cured by omega-6, or anything. A bit dull, really, but that is probably a sign that it is being done right.
The 'hosepiping' usually happens over a longer distances. It is needed if you want to try and hit an incoming missile at a few kilometers. However, the squiggling beams in 'Ghostbusters' did have the right sort of motion, and protons are lighter than other ions and more easily scattered...
Well, well, well. Thanks for that. I wonder if they knew someone in the military, or maybe they just made the beams squiggle because that's what electric arcs do.
Normally the refractive index of a material is quoted as a constant. However, light radiation will slightly distort the electron levels of the material they are passing through, and this will have effect the refractive index. Normally this effect is very tiny. However, if you design high-power lasers, then it can become a nuisance. If you have a bright spot to your beam, then this will locally raise the refractive index. This will, in turn, cause the light to come to a line focus, which raises the intensity even more. If you do not design high-power optics to account for this, then a flat, uniform beam of light can spontaneously divide into a set of filamentary hot spots, which can smash your expensive optics.
There is another process, more usually associated with high-power ion beams. An ion beam that travels a long distance in air can twist like a garden hose squirting water. The ion beam heats up the air it is passing through, which creates a kind of pipe through the air as the hot atoms move away. This is a nuisance if you want to make the beam go in a straight line. One way of keeping an ion-beam weapon firing straight is to put a laser pre-pulse to heat a straight line through the air for the ion beam to travel down.