Bad data - the report used fuzzy public videos of DoD intercepts to determine whether warheads were impacted. However, the very limited publically available data contains no way to know the actualy impact point or, most crucially, the impact's effect on the warhead.
Bad assumptions - the authors assume that the warhead would continue onto their original targets if not directly impacted. In reality, the hypersonic velocity impact of the interceptor on the missile body has the effect of a very energetic conventional explosion very close to the warhead. Very large impact forces would be transferred to the warhead through the missile body and also via fragments produced in the explosion. There is zero probability that the missile warhead would continue on its original course. There is high probability that the warhead would be disabled or destroyed by these forces, which will be much larger than any forces experience in reentry.
Garbage out:
The authors contend that 9 out of 10 intercept tests could not be considered successful. In fact, in all likelihood they were highly successful and verifiably so via sensor data of the debris field after impact.
In other words, the authors of the study put out garbage masquerading as analysis.
The view that our space policy is what's causing other countries to develop anti-satellite weaponry is utterly ludicrous. They are developing those weapons because it's the only course of action that makes any sense at all given that the US military is dominant in conventional warfare due largely to space based communications, surveillance, and weapons guidance.
If we ever get into a war with China, any Chinese concern for collateral economic damage resulting from space operations will vanish into vapor the moment JDAMs and Tomahawks begin slamming into Chinese military headquarters and inflicting catastrophic, paralyzing damage on the Chinese command structure while killing thousands of soldiers by the hour. The fact that these weapons come from terrestrial platforms and are only directed using space assets is a distinction that no commander would care about under those circumstances. To have a chance at victory, China or any other conventional adversary would need to strike at our space capabilities. Therefore, if a country could develop the capability to attack LEO targets, it would.
If you possess an overwhelming military capability, and its linchpin resides in space, then your enemies are compelled to develop a capability to attack you in space. To avoid a space arms race, we would need to a., no longer be dominant militarily, or b. move all of our essenstial capabilities onto terrestrial platforms. Neither of these options are viable or acceptable.
Do you actually know something about Bussard or do you just have a lot of attitude?
Did the Navy actually fund him? Did it receive data from him that suggested some advances?
Who has independently examined his setup? Were you involved in the process? Did you hear about it?
The basic science here seems sound, but there is, I'm sure, plenty of detailed reasons things might not work as envisioned with a scaled up reactor.
Having been active in nanotechnology research for the past few years, I can also tell you that irreproducibility, sketchiness, random technical problems and the like is par for the course. Of course, in the end you come up with some sort of reproducible result, but "reproducibility" often means another lab working for a year or two just to figure out all the little details that actually made things work for you. Clean and straightforward does not usually characterize science. The expenditure of lots of money and lots of frustration does.
This Bussard guy maybe old, may be a little senile, may have glossed over the details, and may be obstinate and difficult to deal with, but that doesn't mean that he's not onto something. Instead of asking for $200 million, which is a lot of money by any standard, the thing for him to do is to ask for a few more million a year from Darpa to gain confidence in the current results and look at technical issues with scaling up his designs. Age and senility might be factors in not wishing to take that route, which likely wouldn't see a working reactor before he dies.
Has there been any instance in our nation's military history where we've won a war without a successful propaganda effort? From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to WWII and Vietnam, we have won wars where propaganda was relatively successful and lost when it was not.
People who think that the military doing propaganda is wrong/evil/unprecedented have never taken an honest look at history.
Get over it people, this is not 1984, this is trying to do a much scaled back version of what we have always done in the past.
No, it's saying that it doesn't need anything exotic. The beauty of their system, if it works, is its simplicity. They've found the simplest iteration of the "quantum computer" that's still useful for real world applications. I hope that they succeed. It would be nice to finally get some accurate energies for quantum chemistry systems where electron correlation is important. Right now, we can't even calculate van der waals forces ab initio.
Their computer is a generalized effort to simulate the running of a subset of computer algorithms with the behavior of a bunch of electrons tunneling around in a series of superconducting wires.
The idea, I guess, is that you take a NP-hard problem such as the traveling salesmen, and encode it in the initial conditions of their circuit, which is initially in a non-equilibrium state. Then you allow the circuit to evolve and reach equilibrium while respecting certain boundary conditions devised according to the problem. The equilibrium conditions of the circuit correspond to the solution to the problem. They claim to have software that allow you to setup the system in a general and high level way.
The basic concept is similar to the way Lynn Adelman solved the traveling salesman problem with DNA. It's not a quantum computer in the strict sense that it could do universal computing. However, for a number of problems, it could do very well.
It's a pretty interest system. I'm intrigued about its potential applications to quantum chemistry.
Computers have infiltrated nearly every field of business and
science, and they keep getting faster. Nonetheless, researchers routinely encounter problems impossible for even the most powerful
supercomputers to solve. The remedy could be quantum computers, which would use the fantastic properties of quantum mechanics to crack
such problems in seconds rather than centuries. Since the 1980s, physicists in academic labs and at firms such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard,
and NEC have pursued a variety of quantum computing approaches, but none seems likely to deliver a working machine in less than 10 years.
Company: D-Wave Systems
Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia
Amount invested: $22 million Canadian (about $17.5 million U.S.)
Lead investor: Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Key founders: Geordie Rose, Alexandre Zagoskin, Bob Wiens, Haig Farris
Technology: Quantum computers
Vancouver startup D-Wave Systems, however, aims to build a quantum computer within three years. It won't be a fully functional quantum
computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could
solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum
algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.
The difference between D-Wave's system and other quantum computer designs is the particular properties of quantum mechanics that they
exploit. Other systems rely on a property called entanglement, which says that any two particles that have interacted in the past, even if
now spatially separated, may still influence each other's states. But that interdependence is easily disrupted by the particles'
interactions with their environment. In contrast, D-Wave's design takes advantage of the far more robust property of quantum physics known
as quantum tunneling, which allows particles to "magically" hop from one location to another.
Incorporated in April 1999, D-Wave originated as a series of conversations among students and lecturers at the University of British
Columbia. Over the years, it has amassed intellectual property and narrowed its focus, while attracting almost $18 million in funding,
initially from angel investors and more recently from the Canadian and German governments, and from venture capital firms. The company
plans to complete a prototype device by the end of 2006; a version capable of solving commercial problems could be ready by 2008, says
president and CEO Geordie Rose.
The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of
low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate
state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need.
The design is also amenable to the lithography techniques used to make standard computer chips, further simplifying fabrication. D-Wave
patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through
them, the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy
between them. The loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to
minimize the magnetic flux between them. Depending on t
The Resasco group at University of Oklahoma is getting pretty close to selectively producing semiconducting nanotubes of a fixed size. http://www.ou.edu/engineering/nanotube/
We have meta-materials that can guide microwaves in the manner described in the article. You could construct such a meterial by embedding a bunch of wires and rings in cardboard, I kid you not, because microwave wavelengths only require structure on the sub-cm scale. We don't have meta-materials that can guide visible light in the same manner since the wavelength of visible light is small enough that the material has to have specific structure on the submicron scale.
As a rule of thumb, EM radiation cannot see any feature smaller than a quarter (IIRC) of its wavelength. Therefore, for microwave radiation, you can create all kinds of sub-centimeter structures to guide electric and magnetic fields. The microwave will see your structures as a uniform material, al beit with strange properties that are caused by the structure you've designed.
Re:Stuff I didn't get from TA
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: 1
You do NOT need any enzymes for this to work. The physics of DNA binding allow these types of mechanisms to work in an enzyme free salt solution with only DNA.
How the DNA origami works
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Virus strand:
The virus strand serves as the basic starting material for the origami. It's a single stranded, 7000 base long piece of DNA from a
virus that attacks bacteria. There are only two reasons the virus strand is used:
1. It is nonrepeating. This is important because every group of 8 bases have a pretty much random sequence of DNA, and can
therefore serve as a unique address for a particular position along the length of the virus strand (you get 4^8 = 65536 possible addresses).
Thus, in this way, you can address ~1000 distinct points along the length of this viral DNA.
2. It's readily available. Since you can harvest the DNA from the virus, it's cheap to produce. In fact, this strand is
commercially available.
DNA staples:
To actually make the virus fold into position, you need several hundred pieces of DNA to serve as staples that stitch together specified
positions along the virus strand. Each staple is 32 bases long. Say that you want to stitch together positions A, BC, and D on
the virus strand. You then make a staple whose first 8 bases are complementary to those at position A on the virus, whose next 16
bases are complementary to position BC, and whose final 8 bases are complementary to D. The DNA staple will then bind to those
positions in solution and staple positions A, BC, and D together into a rigid, tightly packed structure.
You can buy any 32 base long sequences of DNA that you specify from the internet, so getting several hundred distinct strands is no big
deal.
Okay, now how do I make a shape?
Think of how you would draw a smiley face with a CRT screen. Your computer has the outlines of the smiley face in memory, and
raster-fills the shape. In the case of a virus origami, you first specify the outlines of the shape, then you raster-fill it with the
virus strand by running the virus strand side to side from top to bottom. You then figure out all the staples you need to hold your
raster-filled shaped together. Finally, you get the sequences, buy them over the internet, throw them together with the virus strand
in a solution, and wolah, you get the world's smallest smiley face.
Is this important?
Paul Rothemund may get a trip to Stockholm some day.
The administration's cutting of the NIH budget is part of an overall effort to reemphasize funding of the physical sciences. In the
decade after the Cold War, health and biology research saw a funding boom due to the inherent political attractiveness of funding efforts to
fight disease. On the other hand, basic physical sciences suffered from shrinking governmental support because of dissipation of competitive
pressure from the USSR. Today, with new competition from Asia and Europe, the US is seeking to reenergize research in the physical sciences
with massive budget increases. Not all of this money could come from net increases in the overall science budget, especially in tight
fiscal times, so part of the money was shifted from the biological sciences.
And to keep America competitive, one commitment is necessary above all: We must continue to lead the world in human talent and
creativity. Our greatest advantage in the world has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious people -- and we're going to keep that
edge. Tonight I announce an American Competitiveness Initiative, to encourage innovation throughout our economy, and to give our nation's
children a firm grounding in math and science. (Applause.)
First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10
years. This funding will support the work of America's most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology,
supercomputing, and alternative energy sources.
Second, I propose to make permanent the research and development tax credit -- (applause) -- to encourage bolder private-sector
initiatives in technology. With more research in both the public and private sectors, we will improve our quality of life -- and ensure that
America will lead the world in opportunity and innovation for decades to come. (Applause.)
President George Bush is proposing to double the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the next ten years. As the first
step in the doubling process, the President's budget request would increase funding for the National Science Foundation by $439 million or
7.9 percent to $6.02 billion in fiscal year 2007.
....
Noting that most of the increase in federal funding for research and development since 2001 has gone toward biomedical research and
advanced security technologies, President Bush wrote, "To ensure our continued leadership in the world, I am committed to building on our
record of results with new investments - especially in the fields of physical sciences and engineering"
...
Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the
NSF budget in five years.... The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling
initiative. However, the current doubling initiative has been given a high priority in the President's budget request and has strong
support from key members of Congress.
"
The bottom line is that one should not jump to conclusions based on one piece of information without knowing its context. People
are always going to want more money, but some times one has to juggle between priorities.
I scanned the article. The article does not say that total energy observed was greater than the total input energy.
What the article says, and it's easy to be confused by this, is that the observed energy was greater than the kinetic energy of the implosion. However, one has to realize that the kinetic energy isn't the only significant source of energy in the system. There is also the energy in the magnetic field. The article goes on to elucidate a mechanism by which magnetic field energy is converted to thermal energy ions, which is then transferred to electrons to produce soft X-Rays.
Thus, the bottom line here is, unfortunately, that what happened in this experiment was that one component of the total energy input, magnetic energy, which normally is not converted into heat, was converted into heat by a new mechanism. This is what the authors meant by a new energy source. In other words:
NO FUSION.
Okay, time to move along folks, nothing to see here other than some really really really really hot plasma, which probably don't have the density to achieve sustained fusion...yet. =)
Look up the NIH studies. If you are using a condom properly and have sex with a woman who has HIV on a regular basis, your chances of getting AIDs after an entire year of frequent sexual contact is around 20%. Assuming that you have sex 100 times a year, this means that, emprically, your chances of getting AIDS per encounter is around 0.22%.
To every one here who says that we should distribute this drug cheaply to the 3rd world and not with mega-profits
1. AIDS is not what's killing most people in the third world. It's anarchy, ignorance, and poor governance. HIV/AIDS is just an opportunistic infection. There has been a 99% effective prevention aid available at low cost for many many years. It's called a condom. The problems that cause condoms not to be distributed and used are the same ones that will hamper efforts with any wonder drugs.
2. Those mega-profits go towards incentivising and funding new research. Heaven help us if one day mega-breakthroughs no longer generate mega-profits.
Fast and easy for: Highly prallelizable single precision floating point calculations.
Slow and difficult for: Complex integer logic. Double precision floating point math.
From the looks of it, Cell will be a decent gaming engine. Expect highly impressive (not necessarily realistic) gaming physics. AI developers, though, may not be able to squeeze enough performance from Cell for leap ahead AI complexity unless they figure out a way to do AI with floating point matrices. We may therefore start seeing neural networks becoming more popular for PS3 AI's.
The question is, other than gaming development, what will IBM's Cell workstations and servers be good for? Possibly movie CG, military training simulations, imagery processing, etc.
Those hoping for ideal scientific computing platforms will have to look elsewhere unless IBM comes out with double precision SPUs.:(
Further reading of the BatMax website reveals that this magical technology works by releasing electrons with a wavelength of 5 to 10 microns. Which is total bullshit. Five to 10 microns is the length of fifty-thousand atoms. You will NEVER get an electron with wavelength that big emitted from anything, ever. At any rate, no electron could cross the electrically INSULATING battery case. Otherwise, you've got more problems than just a useless sticker on your battery. What we have here is just that, a useless sticker.
When did slashdot become free advertisement for quakery and fraud? I am a material scientist and I have never heard of anything you could stick on to a battery that would extend its life. Legitimate companies would never spend research dollars commercializing a product whose effects are so small that they show up "after 5 to 10 charging cycles." At any rate, the term "nanoceramic" should tip off the savy reader. How would a piece of any material improve the internal operation of a battery? Are they claiming that this magical sticker will change the material characteristics of the battery components themselves? Give me a break!
Re:Quantum Physics is Like 15th Century Astronomy
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 1
This is fine and all for systems whose phase space trajectories converge, but then how do you use statistical physics to explain why we don't see superpositions of different macroscopic states in systems whose phase space trajectories diverge due to small perturbations?
Take for example, the typical explosive. Such systems typically have an initiation step caused by a random and rare endothermic chemical event followed by a detonation wave that propagates throughout the rest of the material, supported by exothermic chemistry. Under low temperature cookoff conditions, the timescale for the initiation event to occur can vary on the order of microseconds. On that timescale, a minor perturbation on the trajectory of atoms causing a single molecule to react or not react could cause the phase space trajectory of the entire block of explosive to diverge exponentially. This would certainly be observable experimentally. So why do we see a single explosion instead of quantum weirdness?
Maybe einselection can explain this. Maybe it can't, but I would not think that statistical mechanics is up to this task!
You have to RTFA. The very point of the article is that quantum mechanics is responsible for everything in the universe. Anything and everything that happens, happens by quantum mechanics. What the PRL article explains in gory mathematical detail is exactly _how_ quantum mechanics constructs our sensible every day classical reality.
Same thing with relativity, which happens _all_the_time_. However, at low relative velocities, the effects are so small that they are not readily evident to use, _but_they_are_there_nevertheless_!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Garbage in:
Bad data - the report used fuzzy public videos of DoD intercepts to determine whether warheads were impacted. However, the very limited publically available data contains no way to know the actualy impact point or, most crucially, the impact's effect on the warhead.
Bad assumptions - the authors assume that the warhead would continue onto their original targets if not directly impacted. In reality, the hypersonic velocity impact of the interceptor on the missile body has the effect of a very energetic conventional explosion very close to the warhead. Very large impact forces would be transferred to the warhead through the missile body and also via fragments produced in the explosion. There is zero probability that the missile warhead would continue on its original course. There is high probability that the warhead would be disabled or destroyed by these forces, which will be much larger than any forces experience in reentry.
Garbage out:
The authors contend that 9 out of 10 intercept tests could not be considered successful. In fact, in all likelihood they were highly successful and verifiably so via sensor data of the debris field after impact.
In other words, the authors of the study put out garbage masquerading as analysis.
The view that our space policy is what's causing other countries to develop anti-satellite weaponry is utterly ludicrous. They are developing those weapons because it's the only course of action that makes any sense at all given that the US military is dominant in conventional warfare due largely to space based communications, surveillance, and weapons guidance.
If we ever get into a war with China, any Chinese concern for collateral economic damage resulting from space operations will vanish into vapor the moment JDAMs and Tomahawks begin slamming into Chinese military headquarters and inflicting catastrophic, paralyzing damage on the Chinese command structure while killing thousands of soldiers by the hour. The fact that these weapons come from terrestrial platforms and are only directed using space assets is a distinction that no commander would care about under those circumstances. To have a chance at victory, China or any other conventional adversary would need to strike at our space capabilities. Therefore, if a country could develop the capability to attack LEO targets, it would.
If you possess an overwhelming military capability, and its linchpin resides in space, then your enemies are compelled to develop a capability to attack you in space. To avoid a space arms race, we would need to a., no longer be dominant militarily, or b. move all of our essenstial capabilities onto terrestrial platforms. Neither of these options are viable or acceptable.
Do you actually know something about Bussard or do you just have a lot of attitude?
Did the Navy actually fund him? Did it receive data from him that suggested some advances?
Who has independently examined his setup? Were you involved in the process? Did you hear about it?
The basic science here seems sound, but there is, I'm sure, plenty of detailed reasons things might not work as envisioned with a scaled up reactor.
Having been active in nanotechnology research for the past few years, I can also tell you that irreproducibility, sketchiness, random technical problems and the like is par for the course. Of course, in the end you come up with some sort of reproducible result, but "reproducibility" often means another lab working for a year or two just to figure out all the little details that actually made things work for you. Clean and straightforward does not usually characterize science. The expenditure of lots of money and lots of frustration does.
This Bussard guy maybe old, may be a little senile, may have glossed over the details, and may be obstinate and difficult to deal with, but that doesn't mean that he's not onto something. Instead of asking for $200 million, which is a lot of money by any standard, the thing for him to do is to ask for a few more million a year from Darpa to gain confidence in the current results and look at technical issues with scaling up his designs. Age and senility might be factors in not wishing to take that route, which likely wouldn't see a working reactor before he dies.
Has there been any instance in our nation's military history where we've won a war without a successful propaganda effort? From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to WWII and Vietnam, we have won wars where propaganda was relatively successful and lost when it was not.
People who think that the military doing propaganda is wrong/evil/unprecedented have never taken an honest look at history.
Get over it people, this is not 1984, this is trying to do a much scaled back version of what we have always done in the past.
No, it's saying that it doesn't need anything exotic. The beauty of their system, if it works, is its simplicity. They've found the simplest iteration of the "quantum computer" that's still useful for real world applications. I hope that they succeed. It would be nice to finally get some accurate energies for quantum chemistry systems where electron correlation is important. Right now, we can't even calculate van der waals forces ab initio.
It's a private company.
Their computer is a generalized effort to simulate the running of a subset of computer algorithms with the behavior of a bunch of electrons tunneling around in a series of superconducting wires.
The idea, I guess, is that you take a NP-hard problem such as the traveling salesmen, and encode it in the initial conditions of their circuit, which is initially in a non-equilibrium state. Then you allow the circuit to evolve and reach equilibrium while respecting certain boundary conditions devised according to the problem. The equilibrium conditions of the circuit correspond to the solution to the problem. They claim to have software that allow you to setup the system in a general and high level way.
The basic concept is similar to the way Lynn Adelman solved the traveling salesman problem with DNA. It's not a quantum computer in the strict sense that it could do universal computing. However, for a number of problems, it could do very well.
It's a pretty interest system. I'm intrigued about its potential applications to quantum chemistry.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=14591&ch=infotech
Computers have infiltrated nearly every field of business and science, and they keep getting faster. Nonetheless, researchers routinely encounter problems impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers to solve. The remedy could be quantum computers, which would use the fantastic properties of quantum mechanics to crack such problems in seconds rather than centuries. Since the 1980s, physicists in academic labs and at firms such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC have pursued a variety of quantum computing approaches, but none seems likely to deliver a working machine in less than 10 years.
Company: D-Wave Systems
Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia
Amount invested: $22 million Canadian (about $17.5 million U.S.)
Lead investor: Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Key founders: Geordie Rose, Alexandre Zagoskin, Bob Wiens, Haig Farris
Technology: Quantum computers
Vancouver startup D-Wave Systems, however, aims to build a quantum computer within three years. It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.
The difference between D-Wave's system and other quantum computer designs is the particular properties of quantum mechanics that they exploit. Other systems rely on a property called entanglement, which says that any two particles that have interacted in the past, even if now spatially separated, may still influence each other's states. But that interdependence is easily disrupted by the particles' interactions with their environment. In contrast, D-Wave's design takes advantage of the far more robust property of quantum physics known as quantum tunneling, which allows particles to "magically" hop from one location to another.
Incorporated in April 1999, D-Wave originated as a series of conversations among students and lecturers at the University of British Columbia. Over the years, it has amassed intellectual property and narrowed its focus, while attracting almost $18 million in funding, initially from angel investors and more recently from the Canadian and German governments, and from venture capital firms. The company plans to complete a prototype device by the end of 2006; a version capable of solving commercial problems could be ready by 2008, says president and CEO Geordie Rose.
The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need.
The design is also amenable to the lithography techniques used to make standard computer chips, further simplifying fabrication. D-Wave patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through them, the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy between them. The loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to minimize the magnetic flux between them. Depending on t
The Resasco group at University of Oklahoma is getting pretty close to selectively producing semiconducting nanotubes of a fixed size. http://www.ou.edu/engineering/nanotube/
We have meta-materials that can guide microwaves in the manner described in the article. You could construct such a meterial by embedding a bunch of wires and rings in cardboard, I kid you not, because microwave wavelengths only require structure on the sub-cm scale. We don't have meta-materials that can guide visible light in the same manner since the wavelength of visible light is small enough that the material has to have specific structure on the submicron scale.
As a rule of thumb, EM radiation cannot see any feature smaller than a quarter (IIRC) of its wavelength. Therefore, for microwave radiation, you can create all kinds of sub-centimeter structures to guide electric and magnetic fields. The microwave will see your structures as a uniform material, al beit with strange properties that are caused by the structure you've designed.
You do NOT need any enzymes for this to work. The physics of DNA binding allow these types of mechanisms to work in an enzyme free salt solution with only DNA.
The Virus strand:
The virus strand serves as the basic starting material for the origami. It's a single stranded, 7000 base long piece of DNA from a virus that attacks bacteria. There are only two reasons the virus strand is used:
1. It is nonrepeating. This is important because every group of 8 bases have a pretty much random sequence of DNA, and can therefore serve as a unique address for a particular position along the length of the virus strand (you get 4^8 = 65536 possible addresses). Thus, in this way, you can address ~1000 distinct points along the length of this viral DNA.
2. It's readily available. Since you can harvest the DNA from the virus, it's cheap to produce. In fact, this strand is commercially available.
DNA staples:
To actually make the virus fold into position, you need several hundred pieces of DNA to serve as staples that stitch together specified positions along the virus strand. Each staple is 32 bases long. Say that you want to stitch together positions A, BC, and D on the virus strand. You then make a staple whose first 8 bases are complementary to those at position A on the virus, whose next 16 bases are complementary to position BC, and whose final 8 bases are complementary to D. The DNA staple will then bind to those positions in solution and staple positions A, BC, and D together into a rigid, tightly packed structure.
You can buy any 32 base long sequences of DNA that you specify from the internet, so getting several hundred distinct strands is no big deal.
Okay, now how do I make a shape?
Think of how you would draw a smiley face with a CRT screen. Your computer has the outlines of the smiley face in memory, and raster-fills the shape. In the case of a virus origami, you first specify the outlines of the shape, then you raster-fill it with the virus strand by running the virus strand side to side from top to bottom. You then figure out all the staples you need to hold your raster-filled shaped together. Finally, you get the sequences, buy them over the internet, throw them together with the virus strand in a solution, and wolah, you get the world's smallest smiley face.
Is this important?
Paul Rothemund may get a trip to Stockholm some day.
The administration's cutting of the NIH budget is part of an overall effort to reemphasize funding of the physical sciences. In the decade after the Cold War, health and biology research saw a funding boom due to the inherent political attractiveness of funding efforts to fight disease. On the other hand, basic physical sciences suffered from shrinking governmental support because of dissipation of competitive pressure from the USSR. Today, with new competition from Asia and Europe, the US is seeking to reenergize research in the physical sciences with massive budget increases. Not all of this money could come from net increases in the overall science budget, especially in tight fiscal times, so part of the money was shifted from the biological sciences.
From the 2006 State of the Union address:
"...
And to keep America competitive, one commitment is necessary above all: We must continue to lead the world in human talent and creativity. Our greatest advantage in the world has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious people -- and we're going to keep that edge. Tonight I announce an American Competitiveness Initiative, to encourage innovation throughout our economy, and to give our nation's children a firm grounding in math and science. (Applause.)
First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support the work of America's most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing, and alternative energy sources.
Second, I propose to make permanent the research and development tax credit -- (applause) -- to encourage bolder private-sector initiatives in technology. With more research in both the public and private sectors, we will improve our quality of life -- and ensure that America will lead the world in opportunity and innovation for decades to come. (Applause.)
..."
Here's another write up from Texas A&M:
"....
President George Bush is proposing to double the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the next ten years. As the first step in the doubling process, the President's budget request would increase funding for the National Science Foundation by $439 million or 7.9 percent to $6.02 billion in fiscal year 2007.
....
Noting that most of the increase in federal funding for research and development since 2001 has gone toward biomedical research and advanced security technologies, President Bush wrote, "To ensure our continued leadership in the world, I am committed to building on our record of results with new investments - especially in the fields of physical sciences and engineering"
...
Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the NSF budget in five years.... The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling initiative. However, the current doubling initiative has been given a high priority in the President's budget request and has strong support from key members of Congress.
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The bottom line is that one should not jump to conclusions based on one piece of information without knowing its context. People are always going to want more money, but some times one has to juggle between priorities.
You could turn gravitational energy into heat. Take an object to a tall building. Drop it....
When I said that I read the article, what I meant was that I scanned the original PRL article.
I scanned the article. The article does not say that total energy observed was greater than the total input energy.
What the article says, and it's easy to be confused by this, is that the observed energy was greater than the kinetic energy of the implosion. However, one has to realize that the kinetic energy isn't the only significant source of energy in the system. There is also the energy in the magnetic field. The article goes on to elucidate a mechanism by which magnetic field energy is converted to thermal energy ions, which is then transferred to electrons to produce soft X-Rays.
Thus, the bottom line here is, unfortunately, that what happened in this experiment was that one component of the total energy input, magnetic energy, which normally is not converted into heat, was converted into heat by a new mechanism. This is what the authors meant by a new energy source. In other words:
NO FUSION.
Okay, time to move along folks, nothing to see here other than some really really really really hot plasma, which probably don't have the density to achieve sustained fusion...yet. =)
Look up the NIH studies. If you are using a condom properly and have sex with a woman who has HIV on a regular basis, your chances of getting AIDs after an entire year of frequent sexual contact is around 20%. Assuming that you have sex 100 times a year, this means that, emprically, your chances of getting AIDS per encounter is around 0.22%.
To every one here who says that we should distribute this drug cheaply to the 3rd world and not with mega-profits
1. AIDS is not what's killing most people in the third world. It's anarchy, ignorance, and poor governance. HIV/AIDS is just an opportunistic infection. There has been a 99% effective prevention aid available at low cost for many many years. It's called a condom. The problems that cause condoms not to be distributed and used are the same ones that will hamper efforts with any wonder drugs.
2. Those mega-profits go towards incentivising and funding new research. Heaven help us if one day mega-breakthroughs no longer generate mega-profits.
Seeing as how France currently gets 76% of her electricity from nuclear power, it's hard to imagine how she could get any warmer.
The original announcement came in 2003:
http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/03newsreleases/nr_Fast and easy for:
:(
Highly prallelizable single precision floating point calculations.
Slow and difficult for:
Complex integer logic.
Double precision floating point math.
From the looks of it, Cell will be a decent gaming engine. Expect highly impressive (not necessarily realistic) gaming physics. AI developers, though, may not be able to squeeze enough performance from Cell for leap ahead AI complexity unless they figure out a way to do AI with floating point matrices. We may therefore start seeing neural networks becoming more popular for PS3 AI's.
The question is, other than gaming development, what will IBM's Cell workstations and servers be good for? Possibly movie CG, military training simulations, imagery processing, etc.
Those hoping for ideal scientific computing platforms will have to look elsewhere unless IBM comes out with double precision SPUs.
Further reading of the BatMax website reveals that this magical technology works by releasing electrons with a wavelength of 5 to 10 microns. Which is total bullshit. Five to 10 microns is the length of fifty-thousand atoms. You will NEVER get an electron with wavelength that big emitted from anything, ever. At any rate, no electron could cross the electrically INSULATING battery case. Otherwise, you've got more problems than just a useless sticker on your battery. What we have here is just that, a useless sticker.
When did slashdot become free advertisement for quakery and fraud? I am a material scientist and I have never heard of anything you could stick on to a battery that would extend its life. Legitimate companies would never spend research dollars commercializing a product whose effects are so small that they show up "after 5 to 10 charging cycles." At any rate, the term "nanoceramic" should tip off the savy reader. How would a piece of any material improve the internal operation of a battery? Are they claiming that this magical sticker will change the material characteristics of the battery components themselves? Give me a break!
This is fine and all for systems whose phase space trajectories converge, but then how do you use statistical physics to explain why we don't see superpositions of different macroscopic states in systems whose phase space trajectories diverge due to small perturbations?
Take for example, the typical explosive. Such systems typically have an initiation step caused by a random and rare endothermic chemical event followed by a detonation wave that propagates throughout the rest of the material, supported by exothermic chemistry. Under low temperature cookoff conditions, the timescale for the initiation event to occur can vary on the order of microseconds. On that timescale, a minor perturbation on the trajectory of atoms causing a single molecule to react or not react could cause the phase space trajectory of the entire block of explosive to diverge exponentially. This would certainly be observable experimentally. So why do we see a single explosion instead of quantum weirdness?
Maybe einselection can explain this. Maybe it can't, but I would not think that statistical mechanics is up to this task!
You have to RTFA. The very point of the article is that quantum mechanics is responsible for everything in the universe. Anything and everything that happens, happens by quantum mechanics. What the PRL article explains in gory mathematical detail is exactly _how_ quantum mechanics constructs our sensible every day classical reality.
Same thing with relativity, which happens _all_the_time_. However, at low relative velocities, the effects are so small that they are not readily evident to use, _but_they_are_there_nevertheless_!!!