Does it bother anyone that most of the the
missing plutonium is thought to have been lost in
the waste water and "dissolved in other elements"?
It is bad enough that the waste is radioactive.
But plutonium is also very poisonous.
If the controls on the plutonium itself have 3%
error rates, how about the controls on the waste?
It would be interesting to see if the reaction
goes away as the IgE is flushed out of the
donated liver, or if it is a new learned response
in the recipient.
It is hard to tell from one or two cases, since
adult onset nut allergies are not uncommon.
It could be a complete coincidence that the man
got an allergy to the same thing that killed the
donor. But the large amounts of IgE that would
be in the liver of someone who died of anaphylaxis
could be causing a temporary allergic response to
nuts.
I would have thought that the immuno-suppressants
needed to prevent rejection would have lowered
the susceptibility to allergens. Perhaps the new
drugs are more targetted these days. Or maybe the
combination of immune-system altering drugs and
the IgE from the liver caused the problem in the
first place.
I would bet that politicians will soon start to
emulate aging soap stars and get them too.
How soon before a newspaper pays to have some
footage analyzed? How soon before tabloids
say
they have had some footage analyzed?
I also would not be surprised if there popped up
a service that taught you how to beat the new
system, for the right fee. Look at all the effort
used to defeat urine tests for drugs...
When 35% of the calories in a meal are removed,
it can make quite a difference. A person could
eat 3 Big Macs a day and still be under the
recommended 2,000 calories. But add the Coke,
and you are 610 calories over your limit.
If you throw away the bun, the Big Mac would
probably fit in an Atkins diet plan, and maybe
even taste better.
Clever use of your new vocabulary, but the work
was done in the U.K., by a U.K. company, for the
U.K. National Health System.
20% of men there, and 25% of women there are
clinically obese. 60% of men are overweight,
and 40% of women.
In the U.S., obesity ranges from 13.8% in Colorado
to 24.3% in Mississippi, with averages less than 20%.
As to the aspersions cast upon cows, the obesity
rates amoung bovines are below 2%. We're getting
less like cows all the time, which is too bad for
our health.
It was mine detection, actually, but the joke was
great anyway.
There are two parts to the new trick. One is to
change the signal the device sends out to a broadband
pulse, but the main part is the software to tease
the extra information out of the echo.
I'm picturing some British slashdotter coding away
frantically while scarfing down typical programmer
food, wondering if his new invention will help him
in time.
There is a bit more information on
this horribly laid-out
page. I haven't found the patent application yet,
maybe someone with better access to British patents
can help out here. Also nothing scholarly on the
web that I can find. Who did the work?
That may have been a problem you worked on, but it
has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
This thread is about replacing fast RAM with fast
non-volatile magnetic memory in handheld devices.
The article says these new memories have a fundamental
switching speed limit of 165 picoseconds. This is
what I find interesting, as 0.165 nanoseconds is
a little over 6 gigahertz. Maybe the speeds will
increase if the magnetic particles can be made
smaller, but it looks like by the time they get
a commercial device on the market, 6 gigahertz
may be too slow for general purpose computers.
On the other hand, if they can make my terrabit
flash memory chip in my digital camcorder record
at 6 gigahertz, I might not need a terrabit of
battery draining RAM to record my grandkids at play.
Indeed, entropy rules, especially in the long run.
That 32 liters of water will eventually evaporate
and rain down as potable water again.
The rest of the ingredients will eventually
randomize into something quite like the rocks
they were refined from.
In the short run, we have people who may be harmed
by the waste, and people who will be helped by having a job building the devices, or cleaning up
after them.
We may lose some things that are hard to replace,
such as certain species, or people we care about.
One proposed solution is to try to account for the
actual costs of things, and make sure that the
buyers of a product are charged for the harm it does. That way the marketplace will ensure that
we buy things based on the true costs. The crisis
of the commons is at work here.
I don't know if such a scheme can be made to work.
What we usually see is the opposite -- subsidizing
oil instead of renewables. It's hard to get someone
to pay for trash removal when it is so easy to throw the stuff in someone else's yard.
The point of the article was that we have an
event made at a particular time, that left a
signature in the sediments. This allows us to
track those sediments over time to find out how
they are transported in that harbor.
This may become important if, say, a dirty bomb
were set off in that city, and we wanted to assess
the cost of cleaning up the harbor. It could also
be used to study the effects of human water pollution
on the sea-floor life in the area.
I wonder if anyone did similar studies after such
events as Chernoble, the oil fires in Iraq, or
after some volcanic eruptions.
Interesting about the radioactive iodine though.
This may be an easier way to study urban water pollution patterns
than looking for antibiotics or hormones in the water.
While you're right about the chances of success,
your comparisons might be a little off.
The first one is about a group of people trying to
rename another group. The second one is weak
because the "pirates" wouldn't want to be called
"copyright infringers" either. They would rather
claim "fair use".
To get the media to change the name for them, they
need to invent a new meaning for the term, so the
media will have to distinguish scientists from
boffins. So if they secretly fund a group of
Lilliputian terrorists, on the condition that they
name themseves "boffins", then the media will be
forced to make a distinction, to avoid being
misunderstood.
Perhaps we can start calling copyright infringers
boffins, and help out the Australian scientists.
Actually, I wasn't forgetting ostriches at all.
They still flap their wings. So do roadrunners.
Flight is expensive. Some birds lose the ability
not because of size, but because they no longer need to fly. The dodo comes to mind.
The fact or assumption that the ostrich used to
fly is not the point. Look at how it uses its
feathers and wings today, and ask yourself if it
would be better off without them. If not, then
they could be a model for a dinosaur that later evolves into a bird.
Predator-prey ratios and other data have been used
to show that some dinosaurs were warm blooded. A
small wam blooded dinosaur would have needed some
kind of insulation, since the heat is generated
by the volume of the animal, but lost through the
surface. The smaller the animal, the large the ratio
of surface to volume, and thus the larger the heat
loss.
The article doesn't say the launch was cancelled
on
More on Rosetta
·
· Score: 1
It looks like a launch can happen on Jan 22, Jan 23, Jan 26, or Jan 29.
Since evolution is still happening all around us,
we can look at some of the "proto-wings" we see
today and make some inferences.
We have squirrels that glide out of trees by stretching
the skin between their legs.
We have snakes that do something similar.
We have flightless birds that still flap their
wings when they run.
We have lizards that stretch membranes much like the flying squirrel. Some of them do it to glide,
while others do it to control their temperature.
If feathers were only for flight, the flightless birds wouldn't have them, and flighted birds would only have them on their wings and tails.
We use down for insulation in ski jackets for the
same reason the goose made it in the first place.
A small, warm blooded dinosaur would need insulation.
Insulation is lightweight for its bulk, so it would
lower the density of the animal as a whole. This
would protect the animal from falls, but it would also make it difficult to run, due to the air resistance overcoming the available traction.
Streamlining would be selected for. Small animals
would experience higher Reynolds numbers (the air would seem thicker to them) and so flapping their feathered arms would get them more benefit than a
larger animal would get.
It would not surprise me to find out that flight
developed in several dinosaurs in parallel, given
that we see it evolving in several quite different
critters today (insects, reptiles, mammals, fish).
Your idea that flight developed as a side effect
of temperature control mechanisms doesn't seem
far-fetched to me at all. In fact, one might call
it near-fletched, if one were a punning fellow.
Single cell analysis is fairly routine.
You isolate a single cell, culture it, and analyze the colony.
But doing what you thought I was talking about is
still not impossible -- amplifying the DNA of a
single cell using the polymerase chain reaction, and fingerprinting what you get.
As for cheap DNA fingerprinting, we're close already. You may be thinking of a complete sequencer, where every base is accounted for. But a fingerprinter is just some enzymes to cut up the DNA in the right places, and some electrophoresis to separate the resulting fragments by molecular weight. This can be automated inexpensively if there is a big enough market for it. The forensic process has to be good enough to hold up in court. The species finder does not, as the results will have to be reproduced anyway, and a good hit on a new species would be enough to send the sample to a lab with better equipment.
While what you say may be true (or not), it does
not seem to be a requirement. If we can see 13
billion light years, and there is only another
billion to go, it seems quite possible that we
could see nearly the entire universe, as it existed at
the age of 1 billion.
Of course it was all dark, since the plasma hadn't
allowed neutral hydrogen to form yet.
There are parts of the universe that are receding from us at the speed of light and faster. Although we might choose a definition of "universe" such that things permanently outside our light cone are excluded, we can indeed see all the way to the big bang -- that's what the cosmic microwave background is.
So we can see all the way back to when the universe was small. It would appear that the further back you look, the more of the universe you can see.
We may find a lot of the DNA from that "stuff" in
the stomachs of critters we dredge up for food.
We may also find it floating around as bits of
meat and cellular tissue.
All you need is one cell for the DNA analysis.
What intrigues me is the potential for amateurs
to help out. It won't be long before cheap DNA
analyzers are available in every police station
and hospital in the developed world, and in
military bases around the world.
Suppose amateurs could bring samples of critters
to a DNA fingerprinter connected to a big Web
database, and it would be added automatically.
Even if the sample was a species already known,
the location might be interesting, or the time
of year it was found. Migratory species could be
tracked this way.
The sorting and cataloging will be automated, but
the collection can be spread out over all the schools and science hobbyists in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it bother anyone that most of the the missing plutonium is thought to have been lost in the waste water and "dissolved in other elements"?
It is bad enough that the waste is radioactive. But plutonium is also very poisonous. If the controls on the plutonium itself have 3% error rates, how about the controls on the waste?
Now we know how Iraq built their mobile spud missile launchers.
Are weapons of mass destruction illegal because it is against the laws of physics to destroy mass?
For a desktop version of the gun, see this cannon.
He wasn't pregnant or elderly, but it would be interesting to know how many other risk factors the guy had.
Was he a smoker? Was alcohol involved? Was he getting enough water to drink? Was he overweight? Did he have any history of heart or blood conditions?
Even for frequent economy-class fliers, this is a rare problem. Most people at least flex their toes and ankles while at the computer, don't they?
When I die and my organs are transplanted into people, the recipients will all have to have notices tatooed on them:
Caution: contains traces of nut.
It would be interesting to see if the reaction goes away as the IgE is flushed out of the donated liver, or if it is a new learned response in the recipient.
It is hard to tell from one or two cases, since adult onset nut allergies are not uncommon. It could be a complete coincidence that the man got an allergy to the same thing that killed the donor. But the large amounts of IgE that would be in the liver of someone who died of anaphylaxis could be causing a temporary allergic response to nuts.
I would have thought that the immuno-suppressants needed to prevent rejection would have lowered the susceptibility to allergens. Perhaps the new drugs are more targetted these days. Or maybe the combination of immune-system altering drugs and the IgE from the liver caused the problem in the first place.
No need for the premature capitulation.
Just get botox injections like poker players do.
I would bet that politicians will soon start to emulate aging soap stars and get them too.
How soon before a newspaper pays to have some footage analyzed? How soon before tabloids say they have had some footage analyzed?
I also would not be surprised if there popped up a service that taught you how to beat the new system, for the right fee. Look at all the effort used to defeat urine tests for drugs...
There are 560 calories in a Big Mac.
There are 310 calories in McDonalds' large Coke.
When 35% of the calories in a meal are removed, it can make quite a difference. A person could eat 3 Big Macs a day and still be under the recommended 2,000 calories. But add the Coke, and you are 610 calories over your limit.
If you throw away the bun, the Big Mac would probably fit in an Atkins diet plan, and maybe even taste better.
Clever use of your new vocabulary, but the work was done in the U.K., by a U.K. company, for the U.K. National Health System.
20% of men there, and 25% of women there are clinically obese. 60% of men are overweight, and 40% of women.
In the U.S., obesity ranges from 13.8% in Colorado to 24.3% in Mississippi, with averages less than 20%.
As to the aspersions cast upon cows, the obesity rates amoung bovines are below 2%. We're getting less like cows all the time, which is too bad for our health.
It was mine detection, actually, but the joke was great anyway.
There are two parts to the new trick. One is to change the signal the device sends out to a broadband pulse, but the main part is the software to tease the extra information out of the echo.
I'm picturing some British slashdotter coding away frantically while scarfing down typical programmer food, wondering if his new invention will help him in time.
There is a bit more information on this horribly laid-out page. I haven't found the patent application yet, maybe someone with better access to British patents can help out here. Also nothing scholarly on the web that I can find. Who did the work?
That may have been a problem you worked on, but it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
This thread is about replacing fast RAM with fast non-volatile magnetic memory in handheld devices.
The article says these new memories have a fundamental switching speed limit of 165 picoseconds. This is what I find interesting, as 0.165 nanoseconds is a little over 6 gigahertz. Maybe the speeds will increase if the magnetic particles can be made smaller, but it looks like by the time they get a commercial device on the market, 6 gigahertz may be too slow for general purpose computers.
On the other hand, if they can make my terrabit flash memory chip in my digital camcorder record at 6 gigahertz, I might not need a terrabit of battery draining RAM to record my grandkids at play.
I seem to recall Eric Wasserman giving a paper on this in 1996 or thereabouts.
There is actually a lot of stuff on this floating around the 'net, as you would expect of a technology that is that old.
Some discussions in more depth can be found here, written for a general audience, and herehere for those who want more meat.
Normal tissue already produces plenty of this protein.
It has low levels in tumors, and raising the levels to 'normal' shrinks the tumors.
See this article for a slightly more technical treatment of the item.
Indeed, entropy rules, especially in the long run.
That 32 liters of water will eventually evaporate and rain down as potable water again.
The rest of the ingredients will eventually randomize into something quite like the rocks they were refined from.
In the short run, we have people who may be harmed by the waste, and people who will be helped by having a job building the devices, or cleaning up after them.
We may lose some things that are hard to replace, such as certain species, or people we care about.
One proposed solution is to try to account for the actual costs of things, and make sure that the buyers of a product are charged for the harm it does. That way the marketplace will ensure that we buy things based on the true costs. The crisis of the commons is at work here.
I don't know if such a scheme can be made to work. What we usually see is the opposite -- subsidizing oil instead of renewables. It's hard to get someone to pay for trash removal when it is so easy to throw the stuff in someone else's yard.
The point of the article was that we have an event made at a particular time, that left a signature in the sediments. This allows us to track those sediments over time to find out how they are transported in that harbor.
This may become important if, say, a dirty bomb were set off in that city, and we wanted to assess the cost of cleaning up the harbor. It could also be used to study the effects of human water pollution on the sea-floor life in the area.
I wonder if anyone did similar studies after such events as Chernoble, the oil fires in Iraq, or after some volcanic eruptions.
Interesting about the radioactive iodine though. This may be an easier way to study urban water pollution patterns than looking for antibiotics or hormones in the water.
While you're right about the chances of success, your comparisons might be a little off.
The first one is about a group of people trying to rename another group. The second one is weak because the "pirates" wouldn't want to be called "copyright infringers" either. They would rather claim "fair use".
To get the media to change the name for them, they need to invent a new meaning for the term, so the media will have to distinguish scientists from boffins. So if they secretly fund a group of Lilliputian terrorists, on the condition that they name themseves "boffins", then the media will be forced to make a distinction, to avoid being misunderstood.
Perhaps we can start calling copyright infringers boffins, and help out the Australian scientists.
Actually, I wasn't forgetting ostriches at all.
They still flap their wings. So do roadrunners.
Flight is expensive. Some birds lose the ability not because of size, but because they no longer need to fly. The dodo comes to mind.
The fact or assumption that the ostrich used to fly is not the point. Look at how it uses its feathers and wings today, and ask yourself if it would be better off without them. If not, then they could be a model for a dinosaur that later evolves into a bird.
I did not mean to imply that this was my own idea.
It has been kicking around for a long time.
See this article for instance.
Predator-prey ratios and other data have been used to show that some dinosaurs were warm blooded. A small wam blooded dinosaur would have needed some kind of insulation, since the heat is generated by the volume of the animal, but lost through the surface. The smaller the animal, the large the ratio of surface to volume, and thus the larger the heat loss.
It looks like a launch can happen on Jan 22, Jan 23, Jan 26, or Jan 29.
Since evolution is still happening all around us, we can look at some of the "proto-wings" we see today and make some inferences.
We have squirrels that glide out of trees by stretching the skin between their legs.
We have snakes that do something similar.
We have flightless birds that still flap their wings when they run.
We have lizards that stretch membranes much like the flying squirrel. Some of them do it to glide, while others do it to control their temperature.
If feathers were only for flight, the flightless birds wouldn't have them, and flighted birds would only have them on their wings and tails. We use down for insulation in ski jackets for the same reason the goose made it in the first place.
A small, warm blooded dinosaur would need insulation. Insulation is lightweight for its bulk, so it would lower the density of the animal as a whole. This would protect the animal from falls, but it would also make it difficult to run, due to the air resistance overcoming the available traction.
Streamlining would be selected for. Small animals would experience higher Reynolds numbers (the air would seem thicker to them) and so flapping their feathered arms would get them more benefit than a larger animal would get.
It would not surprise me to find out that flight developed in several dinosaurs in parallel, given that we see it evolving in several quite different critters today (insects, reptiles, mammals, fish).
Your idea that flight developed as a side effect of temperature control mechanisms doesn't seem far-fetched to me at all. In fact, one might call it near-fletched, if one were a punning fellow.
You might want to read this.
They are doing PCR on single cells.
Single cell analysis is fairly routine. You isolate a single cell, culture it, and analyze the colony.
But doing what you thought I was talking about is still not impossible -- amplifying the DNA of a single cell using the polymerase chain reaction, and fingerprinting what you get.
As for cheap DNA fingerprinting, we're close already. You may be thinking of a complete sequencer, where every base is accounted for. But a fingerprinter is just some enzymes to cut up the DNA in the right places, and some electrophoresis to separate the resulting fragments by molecular weight. This can be automated inexpensively if there is a big enough market for it. The forensic process has to be good enough to hold up in court. The species finder does not, as the results will have to be reproduced anyway, and a good hit on a new species would be enough to send the sample to a lab with better equipment.
While what you say may be true (or not), it does not seem to be a requirement. If we can see 13 billion light years, and there is only another billion to go, it seems quite possible that we could see nearly the entire universe, as it existed at the age of 1 billion.
Of course it was all dark, since the plasma hadn't allowed neutral hydrogen to form yet.
There are parts of the universe that are receding from us at the speed of light and faster. Although we might choose a definition of "universe" such that things permanently outside our light cone are excluded, we can indeed see all the way to the big bang -- that's what the cosmic microwave background is.
So we can see all the way back to when the universe was small. It would appear that the further back you look, the more of the universe you can see.
We may find a lot of the DNA from that "stuff" in the stomachs of critters we dredge up for food. We may also find it floating around as bits of meat and cellular tissue.
All you need is one cell for the DNA analysis.
What intrigues me is the potential for amateurs to help out. It won't be long before cheap DNA analyzers are available in every police station and hospital in the developed world, and in military bases around the world.
Suppose amateurs could bring samples of critters to a DNA fingerprinter connected to a big Web database, and it would be added automatically.
Even if the sample was a species already known, the location might be interesting, or the time of year it was found. Migratory species could be tracked this way.
The sorting and cataloging will be automated, but the collection can be spread out over all the schools and science hobbyists in the world.