Well, you'd still get some good out of it: what you've built is a really inefficient solar sail. Instead of thousands of square metres of aluminized Mylar, you would have a shiny lump of rock. You would still get some momentum transfer from photons bouncing off the sunny side of the rock, and all those pushes would be in the same direction whether the rock rotates or not.
Whether you can move a many-ton rock perceptibly (let alone far enough to do some good) in less than centuries with this technique I leave as an excercise for the reader.
Regardless, any push is a good push--Earth is a pretty small target on an astronomical scale, so giving any push to a rock aimed squarely at Earth won't hurt.
From the other replies to your post, I can see that there are a lot of people on/. that don't realize that you're really not an idiot and that you know the answer to your question is at the bottom of the page.
Apologies to the other posters if you really are an idiot despite your denial.
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has yet mentioned grafting in this discussion of modified foods. When plants are grafted, tissue cut from one plant is bound in close contact with another. The resulting plant contains cells and structures from both plants. Really, if you want to talk about Frankenfoods, this is it: bizarre hybrids made by stitching together pieces of other plants.
You can do a number if interesting things. Trees that produce more than one kind of fruit. Potato plants that sprout tomatoes. Curious cacti.
The technique has more than novelty value. In the late nineteenth century, a louse (phylloxera) was inadvertantly imported to Europe, and it loved to feast on the roots of the wine grape plant (vitis vinifera). We wouldn't have wines from France, or Germany, or Italy, if the viticulturalists of the day hadn't grafted some of the vinifera stalks on to roots of more phylloxera-resistant species. That's right--your glass of Pinot Noir is Frankenfood.
Grafting can go awry, however. There was an incident in Tennessee a number of years ago involving a farmer who wanted his tomatoes to better cope with early fall frosts. He grafted a tomato vine to a local weed. Voila--tomatoes later in the season. His neighbour thought it was a great idea and performed the same trick. Unfortunately, when he shared the fruits of his labour with his family, they all ended up in the emergency ward with high fevers and hallucinations.
It turns out that the plant to which both farmers had grafted their tomatoes was jimsonweed (datura stramonium) which produces psychoactive chemicals in its leaves. Because of different pruning practices, the second farmer's tomatoes contained a much higher concentration of the active ingredient, leading to the poisoning. For more details, consult The Medical Detectives, Berton Roueche, Plume, 1991).
Despite the risks of unpredicted reactions (even after centuries of use), grafting is an accepted and essential part of modern agriculture. We don't have angry demonstrators storming our grocery stores demanding the removal of foods and wine because grafting has been around so long. There may be small risks associated with GM foods--but because of intense public scrutiny, GM foods will be better characterized and more frequently tested than anything else on your plate.
Manufacturers will shy away from introducing obvious potential allergens (peanut proteins and the like, for example) to products for human consumption. Most GM crops are designed to be infertile anyway, severely limiting their spread.
Tempest in a teapot, people. Move along. The ethical sense of agribusiness can be questioned, but not their greed. Simply put, they're going to be damned careful about doing anything that might expose them to ruinously costly lawsuits.
This is not the first time that there have been mix-ups with genetically engineered crops. Such mix-ups are becoming entirely too frequent.
Actually, the mixing of harvested grains has happened inadvertantly for many years. The potential for allergic reactions has always existed. The only reason why this particular case has prompted so much coverage is because it happens to involve a GM crop.
If anything, this sort of cross-contamination of harvested products is becoming less frequent, because food producers are becoming more aware of the liability problems associated with inadvertantly introducing allergens into their products. (What happens if a few peanut plants show up in a wheat field? A whole bunch of people with peanut allergies sue Wonderbread.)
Man has always tampered with nature with many disaterous results to show for it. The transplanting of non-native species has almost always resulted in a proliferation of the species which then becomes a niusance.
Cue ominous music. Um. These crops were planted in a farmer's field--the trees have already been razed, the land levelled, tilled, fertilized, and dosed with herbi/fungi/insecticides. The water table beneath is sinking rapidly to irrigate the crops. Oh, and the soybeans that were planted are essentially a monoculture, vulnerable to disease and destruction.
If you're worried about tampering with nature, you're late by several decades. The soybeans are not likely to be a native species, and the corn that's been planted has already been tweaked into a bizarre parody of its original form by centuries of agriculture. The notion of transplantation of non-native species is a red herring here.
No one knows what negative effects these genetically altered crops will present in the future. All that we do know is that the opportunity for disaster is enormous.
Well, yes. The opportunity for disaster is enormous. The same can be said about anything. I pick the Bush Jr. Presidency. Quantify the opportunity, if you please. Otherwise you're just spewing FUD--and you sound like a bad sci-fi thriller.
It might also be worrying if you were allergic to normal corn (if they still grow that in the USA) (and found it in your soy food).
Nobody eats normal corn these days. The original corn plant actually looked a lot like wheat. Tiny kernels. No supersweet peaches and cream. Corn has been bred and tweaked for centuries to give the product we describe in so cavalier a manner as 'corn'.
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 2
That depends quite a bit on your jurisdiction. IIRC, most debit transactions in Canada charge the retailer a flat fee per transaction. This makes logical sense, since the debit network (Interac, up here) incurs the same overhead for a $3 transaction as a $3000 one.
It's probably the reason why debit has made much greater inroads in Canada than the United States, and why many retailers will give you extra cash back with your purchase. It doesn't cost them any more money, and I don't have to go to an ATM.
Charging a percentage of the transaction makes sense for Visa and Mastercard, because there nominally exists a short-term loan (an extension of credit.)
So, this is a troll, right? I'll bite anyway, because my lunch is still cooking...
I'll be finished my first degree (Chemical Physics) in the spring. I rent, but I pay for it myself. I ride a bike because it's cheaper and better for the environment. (Ironic that you work in the Department of...Atmospheric Science, eh?) I love to cook. And yes, you have lost touch with us all.
'Growing up' doesn't have to be about losing touch with your sense of wonder. Heck, it's what will keep me going in the sciences in grad school.
Of course, you still have to manually check through produce and bulk items, unless you want to put an RFID tag inside every brussels sprout.
I do expect we'll see more self-checkout technology. My local grocery store now has six self-checkout lanes supervised by a single cashier--I assume that the maintenance costs and added 'shrink' are less than the cost of five more full-time cashiers.
Since I was a cashier for a couple of years in high school, I'm faster than a lot of the 'real' cashiers at the store. There's one queue for the six checkout points, so you can't get stuck behind one slow person. On the other hand, I really think if I'm going to do all this extra work for the store, they should be giving me a discount on my groceries.
I think it would be cool to have a spin-off about a *Klingon* ship on it's adventures through space.
Not likely to happen. The makeup would be a killer. As it is, the Klingon cast members of the various Treks have to spend two hours before shooting begins putting on latex and makeup. Takes some time to take it off, too. Can you imagine having to do that with an entire cast--including all the extras--every episode? It boggles the mind...
That's a really nifty way of describing the problem.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, there usually isn't a physical equivalent to the proposed 'tunnels'. Unless some mischievous architect starts adding waveguides between distant floors, the volume associated with each access point will probably be something close to an oblate speroid. Under those limited circumstances, there is a solution to the colouring problem.
In Europe, at least. In the United States, they are still welcome to roll over any competition however they may please, subsidizing their massively unprofitable divisions with monopoly money (the real stuff, not the multicoloured paper you get from Parker Brothers) from Office and Windows.
I'm sure they said the same stuff back in the day when drivers licences came out, but now everyone has it, if not a drivers licence at least an ID so they can still get their beer.
Yes, and we've established that driver's licenses are a very 'leaky' piece of identification from an age verification perspective. Everyone on Slashdot who has ever owned a fake driver's license--or borrowed a license (real or otherwise) from an older sibling--raise your hand. Yes, I thought so.
Having a single magical card that identifies you to transportation agencies is not a panacea; it just creates a false sense of security. Even if it is tied to biometric data, there will be leaks in the system. Finally, if errors (innocent or not) creep into the system, a card with an aura of infallibility will make error correction difficult if not impossible. ("I'm sorry Mr. Gustaffsson--your last name is too long for the name field. From now on, you will be Mr. Gustaff. Have a nice day.")
And identifying people even with 100% accuracy is insufficient to solve the problem that we're targeting. Bear in mind that all of the 9/11 hijackers used their own legitimate identification to board the aircraft. Thorough screening of baggage and alert gate personnel are far more important if the goal is to protect airplanes.
This ID system merely means that we will be able to accurately identify the remains at the crash site.
Slashdotters SHOULD know better. If we're half as smart as we think ourselves, then we ought to be able to distinguish between beta radiation, infrared radiation, etc. and also the safe energy levels of each type of radiation
You're right; we ought to know the basics about different types of radiation--it should be part of every science curriculum. As for knowing safe levels, well...that's a little different.
Deciding whether or not the beta emitter in the battery is actually 'safe' or not requires a little bit of background knowledge. High energy beta emitters like P-32 are actually potentially dangerous. P-32 betas will go quite a distance in air, and even to a significant depth in skin. P-32 in a thin lead lining is even more dangerous, because betas slowed down by lead emit x-rays and gammas.
On the other hand, the source for these batteries (not mentioned in the original article) is Ni-63. Its maximum beta decay energy is about 3% that of P-32, and its betas will be stopped by a sheet of paper or the dead layer of skin. But who here has decay energies memorized? I know I had to look up Ni-63.
So: not all betas are harmless, because not all betas are created equal. Actually, linear accelerators are used to generate high energy betas (up to about 20 MeV) for use in clinical radiation therapy (for cancer treatment). Those little guys can still deliver an appreciable dose down to about ten centimetres in to a tissue volume.
So--you're right. We do have a responsibility to inform the public when we know what we're talking about. I don't think I'd feel very confident discussing safe levels of microwave or infrared exposure. Or UV, for that matter. I know quite a bit more about X-rays and gammas, since I've worked with medical physicists.
Knowledge like booze. Know your limits. Yeah, I know. It's a crappy analogy. Sue me. (But IANAL.)
True, as far as it goes. Alpha particles outside the body are indeed quite harmless--they cannot penetrate the dead skin cells of the epidermis, they don't even travel very far through air. If ingested, alpha emitters are often quite a bit more dangerous than other radioisotopes, because alpha particles deposit all of their energy over a short path. If these short paths intersect cell nuclei, this process can lead to mutation and ultimately cancer.
Betas come in a range of flavours. They are indeed electrons, ejected at high speed from radioactive nuclei. The amount of kinetic energy that they carry depends on the radioactive species under consideration. Phosporous-32 is quite potentially dangerous, it emits betas with an energy of about 690 keV (IIRC). These will penetrate skin quite easily. I mention P-32 because it is frequently used in molecular biology. In the lab, compounds containing P-32 must be stored encased in plexiglass (thickness varies with concentration and quantity of isotope), and shielding employed by researchers.
The batteries that they're working on at Caltech are based around Nickel-63. Ni-63 has a beta decay energy of up to 17 keV. That's pretty pathetic, and it won't penetrate skin. It's actually annoying for researchers for a different reason: you can't detect it with a Geiger counter because the weak betas won't penetrate the window at the end of the Geiger tube. If you spill a compound containing Ni-63, it's harder to find all of it when you clean up. (P-32, on the other hand, gives quite a nice signal.)
So: Alphas are harmless outside the body, and bad if ingested. Betas may or may not be harmless outside the body (Ni-63 is, P-32 isn't) and are bad if ingested--though not as bad as alpha emitters. The section of the article to which you allude was badly written, but it wasn't as far wrong as it could have been.
In all seriousness if the manufacturers can guarentee that its safe I'm all for portable power that lasts 200 years.
That's just great. Someone drops his pager in a movie theatre, and the damn thing beeps for two centuries before someone can find and kill it.
Also, who wants a laptop that has to be disposed of as nuclear waste? It's fine for pacemakers and that sort of thing--there don't need to be that many in circulation (pun not intended) and nobody is going to be trading in for a newer model every eighteen months.
Finally, have you seen some of the stupid things that people do to their consumer electronics? (Backing over a laptop in the driveway comes to mind.) This could lead to releases of potentially hazardous levels of radiation--perhaps inadvertant ingestion of radioactive material from a small leak in the casing.
Re:Sixties are overrated
on
Redirecting NASA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't mean to flame, but isn't it true that nothing much happened in the 60s from a scientific perspective.
In one way, you're quite right. There was very little pure science done during the 60's. On the other hand, there was a great deal of applied science. The space program resulted in a great deal of good materials and manufacturing science. The computers aboard Apollo were state of the art, and the mission couldn't have flown based on the technology available at the beginning of the decade. From a pure science standpoint, yes--all they did was bring back some rocks. But engineering spinoffs are quite valuable as well--and marketable, which certainly shouldn't hurt NASA.
Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).
Good science sometimes also is interesting. When Voyager sent back pictures (grainy false-colour ones, at that) of an active volcano on Io, it made the cover of a lot of periodicals, including IIRC National Geographic. Science is a harder sell than disaster, but it's not impossible.
The building is more than one hundred years old. (Actually, it's quite a bit older than that.) Any patents, copyrights, etc. have long since expired, if such could be said to exist for a building design anyway. The architects are long dead. The structure itself isn't trademarked.
So Lucas borrowed a library design--or possibly just a style that is quite common in many older libraries. If he's going to steal stuff, it's good that it's public domain stuff. It's a little depressing that it's better than a lot of the original bits of AOTC, however.
This is not the news you're looking for. Move along.
Couldn't it be that this person's immune system is so compromised that no AB would cure him? He's one breath away from a corpse.
This is entirely possible, but it wouldn't affect the status of the bacterium as resistant. To test for resistance, bacteria can (and often are) extracted from the patient and cultured in vitro in the presence of various antibiotics. The guy may have been to sick to live either way, but the call on the antibiotic resistance of his infection can be confirmed regardless of the poor guy's health. Tests for resistant bacteria can be performed even post mortem as long as the corpse is still fairly fresh.
I used to work in a hospital and we had a lot of patients with MRSA (Multiple Resistance to Strains of Antibiotics) related issues.
If you worked in a hospital, you obviously weren't a doctor or nurse. MRSA is Methicillin Resistant Staph(ylococcus) Aureus--a bacterial strain that is resistant to one of the antibiotic 'big guns' methicillin.
There are few choices of antibiotics left to treat it (for example, vancomycin--though vancomycin resistant staph was observed recently, IIRC). A patient with MRSA is unlikely to survive the trauma of surgery coupled with a serious infection, because the drugs used to treat MRSA are often not friendly in their side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you can move a many-ton rock perceptibly (let alone far enough to do some good) in less than centuries with this technique I leave as an excercise for the reader.
Regardless, any push is a good push--Earth is a pretty small target on an astronomical scale, so giving any push to a rock aimed squarely at Earth won't hurt.
Apologies to the other posters if you really are an idiot despite your denial.
Cheers.
So the beverage made from grafted grape varieties would be Frankenwine, would it not?
You can do a number if interesting things. Trees that produce more than one kind of fruit. Potato plants that sprout tomatoes. Curious cacti.
The technique has more than novelty value. In the late nineteenth century, a louse (phylloxera) was inadvertantly imported to Europe, and it loved to feast on the roots of the wine grape plant (vitis vinifera). We wouldn't have wines from France, or Germany, or Italy, if the viticulturalists of the day hadn't grafted some of the vinifera stalks on to roots of more phylloxera-resistant species. That's right--your glass of Pinot Noir is Frankenfood.
Grafting can go awry, however. There was an incident in Tennessee a number of years ago involving a farmer who wanted his tomatoes to better cope with early fall frosts. He grafted a tomato vine to a local weed. Voila--tomatoes later in the season. His neighbour thought it was a great idea and performed the same trick. Unfortunately, when he shared the fruits of his labour with his family, they all ended up in the emergency ward with high fevers and hallucinations.
It turns out that the plant to which both farmers had grafted their tomatoes was jimsonweed (datura stramonium) which produces psychoactive chemicals in its leaves. Because of different pruning practices, the second farmer's tomatoes contained a much higher concentration of the active ingredient, leading to the poisoning. For more details, consult The Medical Detectives, Berton Roueche, Plume, 1991).
Despite the risks of unpredicted reactions (even after centuries of use), grafting is an accepted and essential part of modern agriculture. We don't have angry demonstrators storming our grocery stores demanding the removal of foods and wine because grafting has been around so long. There may be small risks associated with GM foods--but because of intense public scrutiny, GM foods will be better characterized and more frequently tested than anything else on your plate.
Manufacturers will shy away from introducing obvious potential allergens (peanut proteins and the like, for example) to products for human consumption. Most GM crops are designed to be infertile anyway, severely limiting their spread.
Tempest in a teapot, people. Move along. The ethical sense of agribusiness can be questioned, but not their greed. Simply put, they're going to be damned careful about doing anything that might expose them to ruinously costly lawsuits.
Actually, the mixing of harvested grains has happened inadvertantly for many years. The potential for allergic reactions has always existed. The only reason why this particular case has prompted so much coverage is because it happens to involve a GM crop.
If anything, this sort of cross-contamination of harvested products is becoming less frequent, because food producers are becoming more aware of the liability problems associated with inadvertantly introducing allergens into their products. (What happens if a few peanut plants show up in a wheat field? A whole bunch of people with peanut allergies sue Wonderbread.)
Man has always tampered with nature with many disaterous results to show for it. The transplanting of non-native species has almost always resulted in a proliferation of the species which then becomes a niusance.
Cue ominous music. Um. These crops were planted in a farmer's field--the trees have already been razed, the land levelled, tilled, fertilized, and dosed with herbi/fungi/insecticides. The water table beneath is sinking rapidly to irrigate the crops. Oh, and the soybeans that were planted are essentially a monoculture, vulnerable to disease and destruction.
If you're worried about tampering with nature, you're late by several decades. The soybeans are not likely to be a native species, and the corn that's been planted has already been tweaked into a bizarre parody of its original form by centuries of agriculture. The notion of transplantation of non-native species is a red herring here.
No one knows what negative effects these genetically altered crops will present in the future. All that we do know is that the opportunity for disaster is enormous.
Well, yes. The opportunity for disaster is enormous. The same can be said about anything. I pick the Bush Jr. Presidency. Quantify the opportunity, if you please. Otherwise you're just spewing FUD--and you sound like a bad sci-fi thriller.
Nobody eats normal corn these days. The original corn plant actually looked a lot like wheat. Tiny kernels. No supersweet peaches and cream. Corn has been bred and tweaked for centuries to give the product we describe in so cavalier a manner as 'corn'.
It's probably the reason why debit has made much greater inroads in Canada than the United States, and why many retailers will give you extra cash back with your purchase. It doesn't cost them any more money, and I don't have to go to an ATM.
Charging a percentage of the transaction makes sense for Visa and Mastercard, because there nominally exists a short-term loan (an extension of credit.)
It's INCONCEIVABLE that he could not know what that word means.
I'll be finished my first degree (Chemical Physics) in the spring. I rent, but I pay for it myself. I ride a bike because it's cheaper and better for the environment. (Ironic that you work in the Department of...Atmospheric Science, eh?) I love to cook. And yes, you have lost touch with us all.
'Growing up' doesn't have to be about losing touch with your sense of wonder. Heck, it's what will keep me going in the sciences in grad school.
Oh, and for the record, I loved Lilo & Stitch.
I do expect we'll see more self-checkout technology. My local grocery store now has six self-checkout lanes supervised by a single cashier--I assume that the maintenance costs and added 'shrink' are less than the cost of five more full-time cashiers.
Since I was a cashier for a couple of years in high school, I'm faster than a lot of the 'real' cashiers at the store. There's one queue for the six checkout points, so you can't get stuck behind one slow person. On the other hand, I really think if I'm going to do all this extra work for the store, they should be giving me a discount on my groceries.
It was determined that he was actually carrying his wife's razor. Gilette officials declined to comment.
Not likely to happen. The makeup would be a killer. As it is, the Klingon cast members of the various Treks have to spend two hours before shooting begins putting on latex and makeup. Takes some time to take it off, too. Can you imagine having to do that with an entire cast--including all the extras--every episode? It boggles the mind...
Meanwhile, back in the real world, there usually isn't a physical equivalent to the proposed 'tunnels'. Unless some mischievous architect starts adding waveguides between distant floors, the volume associated with each access point will probably be something close to an oblate speroid. Under those limited circumstances, there is a solution to the colouring problem.
In Europe, at least. In the United States, they are still welcome to roll over any competition however they may please, subsidizing their massively unprofitable divisions with monopoly money (the real stuff, not the multicoloured paper you get from Parker Brothers) from Office and Windows.
Yes, and we've established that driver's licenses are a very 'leaky' piece of identification from an age verification perspective. Everyone on Slashdot who has ever owned a fake driver's license--or borrowed a license (real or otherwise) from an older sibling--raise your hand. Yes, I thought so.
Having a single magical card that identifies you to transportation agencies is not a panacea; it just creates a false sense of security. Even if it is tied to biometric data, there will be leaks in the system. Finally, if errors (innocent or not) creep into the system, a card with an aura of infallibility will make error correction difficult if not impossible. ("I'm sorry Mr. Gustaffsson--your last name is too long for the name field. From now on, you will be Mr. Gustaff. Have a nice day.")
And identifying people even with 100% accuracy is insufficient to solve the problem that we're targeting. Bear in mind that all of the 9/11 hijackers used their own legitimate identification to board the aircraft. Thorough screening of baggage and alert gate personnel are far more important if the goal is to protect airplanes. This ID system merely means that we will be able to accurately identify the remains at the crash site.
It's really very ironic, then, is it not? I mean, the bit about you only capitalizing the first word of alternate sentences...
You forgot to mention that by taking these steps, you will find 3. Profit!!!
You're right; we ought to know the basics about different types of radiation--it should be part of every science curriculum. As for knowing safe levels, well...that's a little different.
Deciding whether or not the beta emitter in the battery is actually 'safe' or not requires a little bit of background knowledge. High energy beta emitters like P-32 are actually potentially dangerous. P-32 betas will go quite a distance in air, and even to a significant depth in skin. P-32 in a thin lead lining is even more dangerous, because betas slowed down by lead emit x-rays and gammas.
On the other hand, the source for these batteries (not mentioned in the original article) is Ni-63. Its maximum beta decay energy is about 3% that of P-32, and its betas will be stopped by a sheet of paper or the dead layer of skin. But who here has decay energies memorized? I know I had to look up Ni-63.
So: not all betas are harmless, because not all betas are created equal. Actually, linear accelerators are used to generate high energy betas (up to about 20 MeV) for use in clinical radiation therapy (for cancer treatment). Those little guys can still deliver an appreciable dose down to about ten centimetres in to a tissue volume.
So--you're right. We do have a responsibility to inform the public when we know what we're talking about. I don't think I'd feel very confident discussing safe levels of microwave or infrared exposure. Or UV, for that matter. I know quite a bit more about X-rays and gammas, since I've worked with medical physicists.
Knowledge like booze. Know your limits. Yeah, I know. It's a crappy analogy. Sue me. (But IANAL.)
Betas come in a range of flavours. They are indeed electrons, ejected at high speed from radioactive nuclei. The amount of kinetic energy that they carry depends on the radioactive species under consideration. Phosporous-32 is quite potentially dangerous, it emits betas with an energy of about 690 keV (IIRC). These will penetrate skin quite easily. I mention P-32 because it is frequently used in molecular biology. In the lab, compounds containing P-32 must be stored encased in plexiglass (thickness varies with concentration and quantity of isotope), and shielding employed by researchers.
The batteries that they're working on at Caltech are based around Nickel-63. Ni-63 has a beta decay energy of up to 17 keV. That's pretty pathetic, and it won't penetrate skin. It's actually annoying for researchers for a different reason: you can't detect it with a Geiger counter because the weak betas won't penetrate the window at the end of the Geiger tube. If you spill a compound containing Ni-63, it's harder to find all of it when you clean up. (P-32, on the other hand, gives quite a nice signal.)
So: Alphas are harmless outside the body, and bad if ingested. Betas may or may not be harmless outside the body (Ni-63 is, P-32 isn't) and are bad if ingested--though not as bad as alpha emitters. The section of the article to which you allude was badly written, but it wasn't as far wrong as it could have been.
That's just great. Someone drops his pager in a movie theatre, and the damn thing beeps for two centuries before someone can find and kill it.
Also, who wants a laptop that has to be disposed of as nuclear waste? It's fine for pacemakers and that sort of thing--there don't need to be that many in circulation (pun not intended) and nobody is going to be trading in for a newer model every eighteen months.
Finally, have you seen some of the stupid things that people do to their consumer electronics? (Backing over a laptop in the driveway comes to mind.) This could lead to releases of potentially hazardous levels of radiation--perhaps inadvertant ingestion of radioactive material from a small leak in the casing.
In one way, you're quite right. There was very little pure science done during the 60's. On the other hand, there was a great deal of applied science. The space program resulted in a great deal of good materials and manufacturing science. The computers aboard Apollo were state of the art, and the mission couldn't have flown based on the technology available at the beginning of the decade. From a pure science standpoint, yes--all they did was bring back some rocks. But engineering spinoffs are quite valuable as well--and marketable, which certainly shouldn't hurt NASA.
Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).
Good science sometimes also is interesting. When Voyager sent back pictures (grainy false-colour ones, at that) of an active volcano on Io, it made the cover of a lot of periodicals, including IIRC National Geographic. Science is a harder sell than disaster, but it's not impossible.
By the way, it's truly an honour to meet someone on /. who does read the articles.
So Lucas borrowed a library design--or possibly just a style that is quite common in many older libraries. If he's going to steal stuff, it's good that it's public domain stuff. It's a little depressing that it's better than a lot of the original bits of AOTC, however.
This is not the news you're looking for. Move along.
This is entirely possible, but it wouldn't affect the status of the bacterium as resistant. To test for resistance, bacteria can (and often are) extracted from the patient and cultured in vitro in the presence of various antibiotics. The guy may have been to sick to live either way, but the call on the antibiotic resistance of his infection can be confirmed regardless of the poor guy's health. Tests for resistant bacteria can be performed even post mortem as long as the corpse is still fairly fresh.
If you worked in a hospital, you obviously weren't a doctor or nurse. MRSA is Methicillin Resistant Staph(ylococcus) Aureus--a bacterial strain that is resistant to one of the antibiotic 'big guns' methicillin.
There are few choices of antibiotics left to treat it (for example, vancomycin--though vancomycin resistant staph was observed recently, IIRC). A patient with MRSA is unlikely to survive the trauma of surgery coupled with a serious infection, because the drugs used to treat MRSA are often not friendly in their side effects.