This could be an especially attractive method of delivering treatment for rheumatoid arthritis if it could be made to work. As an example, among the current state of the art in rheumatoid arthritis treatment is rituximab. Rituximab is an engineered mouse/human chimeric monoclonal antibody that targets CD20, a protein unique to B-lymphocytes, whose overactivity is a major factor of RA. Because it is a monoclonal antibody, it is very expensive, and short-lived in the body. The nanoparticles used in this cancer study were made from starch and polyethylene glycol. All rituximab can really do to B cells is kill them, which gets the job done, but can leave the patient with serious immunological vulnerabilities. A more sophisticated treatment would be to use CD20-targeted nanoparticles to bind to B cells and deliver a package of siRNA that interferes selectively with the transcription/translation of genes involved only in the autoimmunity.
Well, yes and no. You are absolutely right in that this isn't a permanent effect, in the sense that the DNA of the cancer cells is not altered at all. RNA interference is like putting a defender in the game to intercept a pass; if the defender leaves the field, the receiver will be open again. Translation of the ribonucleotide reductase gene will only be blocked as long as the interfering RNA is there to block the messenger RNA. However, ribonucleotide reductase is incredibly important; it's the enzyme that tears a hydroxyl group off of ribonucleotides and makes them deoxyribonucleotides. A cell cannot make DNA without it. The notion is that cancer cells being treated with RNAi will die during the course of treatment, with no way to replace them. If you get all the cancer, there is no way for it to "bounce back," and if you miss some, then at least progression has been seriously slowed.
On the point of receptors, that raises an interesting point. The nanoparticles used in this experiment target transferrin receptor, a cell surface receptor for the iron-carrying protein transferrin. Transferrin is highly upregulated in cancer cells because iron is required by many enzymes important to cell division (including ribonucleotide reductase, incidentally). Because it is so vital, cancer cells probably cannot just stop making transferrin. Developing a mutant form of transferrin that the nanoparticles cannot adhere to is a possibility, but there'd be a very narrow window of success (success from the cancer's POV). After all, cancer develops a transferrin receptor because it needs to get iron from transferrin- the same transferrin floating in your bloodstream your healthy cells uses. So whatever stealth transferrin receptor cancer cells come up to hide from nanoparticles still has to be compatible with real transferrin, or the cancer cells will be unable to divide.
Good enough for me- that's clearly the "Nothing to see here, move along" step of the reaction, which is an important part of many industrial processes.
But oil isn't used as a catalyst in those processes. There is a lot of research into catalysts that would facilitate the splitting of water, either by electricity or by sunlight; almost all of it centers around solid structures of transition metals like platinum. The confused summary is probably referring to the steam reforming of hydrocarbons, which is by far the largest industrial source of hydrogen (but hydrocarbons are the feedstock, not a catalyst). The process produces abundant hydrogen from water and methane, but is energy-intensive and directly produces large amounts of carbon dioxide (that carbon and oxygen had to go somewhere).
There are several different formulations of magnesium-based cements, so it's hard to say what the properties of this material would be- and concrete is a complex material where small tweaks in composition can make for big alterations in attributes. I found this brochure from D_Shape (PDF) that underneath the dramatic vision-pitching gets at more of the specifics. From the description of the material, "The stone is very similar to marble," and the description of what comes out of the nozzles as "a bicomponent liquid/solid inorganic binder," it sounds like a form of magnesium oxychloride, aka Sorel cement. Sorel cement is prepared by mixing solid magnesia (MgO) with magnesium chloride brine. It goes on to mention the possibility of adding
"reinforcing fibres selected from the group comprised of glass fibres, carbon fibres, nylon fibres."
Magnesium-based cements can be superior to their calcium silicate (Portland cement-like) counterparts in terms of strength, and they set very quickly, but the traditional issue they have had is that they are more susceptible to water erosion (the cured cement is more water soluble than Portland cement), and so they've been more popular for quick-patch type work rather than large-scale construction. Modern advances in its composition are improving its water resistance, however, and notably, water erosion would not be much of a problem on the moon.
The number that gets dropped in the abstract is 104 W/mK. The highly oriented polyethylene fiber Dyneema has a listed thermal conductivity of 20 W/mK, so this figure would represent a significant advance from the polyethylene fibers currently out there. As you can also see, the "service temperature" for Dyneema tops out at 100C and it melts at about 150C. This new PE fiber with a higher degree of crystallinity would likely bump those numbers up slightly, but it would still be unsuitable for very high temperatures.
Since there's at least some variability, it might be best to characterize it as having a "high degree of crystallinity." Polyethylene oriented in this way sounds a lot like the ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fibers marketed as Spectra and Dyneema. Those are made by an extrusion process called gel spinning, and the polymer chains also have a high degree of crystallinity and parallel order. I don't know if the oriented nature of gel-spun UHMWPE fibers is quite at the same level and provides the same thermal properties as ones made by drawing them out with an AFM cantilever, but they might be "good enough," considering that gel spinning is a scalable industrial production method while cantilever drawing is a "very careful scientist" sort of method.
The cantilever drawing method does remind me of making nylon in freshman chemistry lab- you mix hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride together, and you can carefully pull out a nylon fiber with a stirring rod. Slightly less precise product though.
Mammals actually handle sex inheritance in an inverted arrangement from birds. Whereas mammals use the X/Y system, where males are the heterogametic type (XY) and females are the homogametic type (XX), birds (and some other animals) use a "ZW system" where males are ZZ and females are ZW. A notable feature of ZW determination is that the Z chromosome is more like a full-fledged chromosome with many genes, unlike the mammalian Y chromosome which has been paring down its genes so that it contains the sex-determining gene SRY, some genes necessary for sperm production, and little else.
This might go a long way towards explaining gynandromorphism in birds. In mammals, maleness is handled in a top-down fashion- the Y chromosome does not explicitly specify most aspects of the male phenotype, instead simply encouraging the cells that go on to make androgens, which then go on to produce a cascade of developmental effects throughout the body. In birds, the Z and W chromosomes both may have enough genes that sex determination can be handled from the bottom up, locally in each cell.
Despite my efforts to fix those exponents after pasting in the abstract, it looks like I missed one- it should read,"amplified by more than 10^4 times the bulk value," not "amplified by more than 104 times the bulk value." The above linked abstract uses superscripts, and (hopefully) contains the correct values for everything.
The orignal article may be found here- subscription to Nature Materials or payment required for full text.
Abstract:
Theoretical calculations predict that by coupling an exothermic chemical reaction with a nanotube or nanowire possessing a high axial thermal conductivity, a self-propagating reactive wave can be driven along its length. Herein, such waves are realized using a 7-nm cyclotrimethylene trinitramine annular shell around a multiwalled carbon nanotube and are amplified by more than 104 times the bulk value, propagating faster than 2 m s-1, with an effective thermal conductivity of 1.28±0.2kWm-1K-1 at 2,860K. This wave produces a concomitant electrical pulse of disproportionately high specific power, as large as 7kW kg-1, which we identify as a thermopower wave. Thermally excited carriers flow in the direction of the propagating reaction with a specific power that scales inversely with system size. The reaction also evolves an anisotropic pressure wave of high total impulse per mass (300 N s kg-1). Such waves of high power density may find uses as unique energy sources.
The "fuel" used, cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, may be better known as the explosive RDX.
A lot of denatured alcohol is now denatured with a substance called denatomium benzoate, which does not pose serious known health effects, but is unbearably bitter in even parts per million concentrations. Most times when ethyl alcohol is used in a cosmetic product, it is labeled as "denatured alcohol" or "SD alcohol 40" it contains this substance. Benzene is rarely specifically added as a denaturing agent to alcohol, on account of it being carcinogenic. Not saying it never happens, just that it requires a special lack of scruples. Benzene however is occasionally used as an azeotrope in anhydrous alcohol- to distill ethanol past around 95%, you need to set up another azeotrope that boils off earlier ( taking the water with it) and leaving absolute alcohol. So a lot of high proof industrial alcohol has traces of things like benzene or cyclohexane as a consquence of its production.
The virus involved is not completely harmless- according to the cited Nature article, it is associated with leukemia, and possibly increased susceptibility to other infections . However, it doesn't sound at all like KoRV represents the sort of threat that HIV poses in humans. HIV infection is a direct threat to the immune system since it uses the glycoprotein CD4 to gain entry into cells, and it happens that the cells covered with CD4 are essential to the immune system. HIV isn't dangerous just because it's a retrovirus, but rather because T helper cells happen to be very important. There's nothing inherently more dangerous about retroviruses or that makes their associated infections more serious. They do tend to mutate faster as a consequence of the error-prone reverse transcription process, which does often make a lasting effective treatment hard to develop.
This koala retrovirus sounds more like any of the number of transmissible leukemia viruses out there. In causing cancer, the action of a virus is usually indirect, and not associated with its viral lifecycle. When viral genes integrate into the host genome, there's a chance of breaking some important host gene- for a cell cycle regulator, growth factor, tumor supressor, etc whose malfunction leads to cancer. The cancers tend to be leukemias, lymphomas, or digestive tract cancers since those cells are frequently replaced. In humans, there are seven known viruses implicated in causing cancer, of which human T-lymphotrophic virus (causes T-cell leukemia and T-cell lymphoma in about 5% of infections) is the only retrovirus. As far as I can tell, HIV and HTLV are the only symptomatic retroviruses in humans.
Retroviruses that lead to leukemia are fairly common in the animal kingdom- there's bovine leukemia virus, feline leukemia virus, etc. The good news for the koalas is that such viruses tend to at their worst be a persistent low-level threat, but not the sort of plague that wipes populations out.
The Chinese attempted a landing before the warning- and before the conversion of Jupiter into a star. Really bad stuff did occur, because their landing attracted the native life of Europa. The reason the monolith ignited Jupiter at the story's end was in large part to give that native life a more hospitable enviroment for development by thawing the Europan ice.
Just my interpretation, but I believe that the proto-omniscient intelligence assumed that whether or not humans let their curiosity get the better of them was irrelevant since it could easily stop any attempt at landing. The implied end of the monolith's message was really "ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE. UNDERSTAND THAT IT WOULD BE NO PROBLEM AT ALL TO THWART YOUR PITIFUL EFFORTS. NOTICE THAT JUPITER IS NOW A STAR? YEAH."
And according to "2061: Odyssey Three," all attempts to send robotic probes failed when they got close- it wasn't just an idle warning; a monolith stuck around on Europa in order to protect it from interference. So while the other Galilean moons were colonized soon after Jupiter was ignited, humanity really did stay off the surface. Until a gigantic diamond hit Europa, anyway.
He collaborated on the same work in nuclear physics that Alfred Nobel is known for.
Honestly, the parent does have a point though- other than nobelium and copernicium, there seems to be a clear trend from americium (#95) onward to name elements either for their place of discovery or after important nuclear scientists. Although, you could make the case that Einstein was not primarily a nuclear physicist, and the nucleus wasn't even known when Mendeleev drew up his table, they had made important contributions to the understanding of atoms. Copernicus is certainly deserving of the honor, and there's nothing to forbid it in terms of the IUPAC rules- I just think it's interesting that a 300-year gap exists between Copernicus and the next scientist so honored. Next up: newtonium?
And (even more minor quibble) it's not even technically true that uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element on earth. Trace amounts of some transuranic elements are found in deposits of uranium ore, particularly at the natural nuclear reactor at Oklo, Gabon as a result of neutron irradiation of uranium, the same principle as used in breeder reactors.
Probably the most significant texts to undergo this process were Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements; both had been lost to Western Europe, and were thus translated in the Middle Ages to Latin from Arabic by Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath, respectively. I believe in both cases the original Greek texts were eventually recovered by the West used for later direct translations, but for a while Western Europe knew Hipparkhos/Hipparchus as "Abrachir."
In the United States, since 1991, the date of Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., music samples need to be cleared by the copyright holder. That's what seems to be the real distinction here- you cannot consider literary plagarism to be analogous to music sampling because in fact legal music sampling is nothing like plagarism- works are cited, permission is requested and granted and often a considerable sum of money or share of future earnings takes place.
Attempting to factor Jack Bauer into the equation would be just like trying to divide by zero, except that when you try to divide by zero, you don't get shot in the face.
That should either be "doesn't" or "does not," and not my indecisive combination of the two, which alters meaning somewhat. On another note, I can't figure out how this liquid glass stuff is supposed to work as a product. The "liquid glass" manufacturers suggest it can be made into a spray in water or ethanol, but it apparently dries to form a waterproof coating. They claim to use no additives, but I'm not sure how aggregation of suspended silica is prevented- how is it stored in bottles without having a big slug of glass form at the bottom?
Products like Knot Wax are more like a plastic shell than a glass shell. The process takes two parts because first a coating of a resin is laid down (usually either a polyepoxide or polyurethane), and then an amine is applied to cross-link the resin molecules, leading to a very tough coating. The product discussed here appears to be a solution of short chains of silica, which when applied deposit actual glass on the surface. I'm curious about the strength of such a coating; there doesn't not appear to be any suggestion that the glass is bonded to the surface by anything stronger than van der Waals forces.
I'd assume the release dates had to do with meeting the holiday rush in Western countries. In the United States, launching later than the Friday after Thanksgiving (Nov. 27 last year) might have cost them some sales. Obviously, having product for Black Friday is not a concern for European retailers as it is in the US, but Dec. 3 still cuts close for Christmas shopping. In Japan, they could have approached the launch date a bit more leisurely.
My guess is that the difference in density may be strongly dependent on the pressure. At standard conditions, diamond is actually the densest form of pure carbon, and at atmospheric pressure, carbon sublimates instead of melting. It seems possible to me that liquid diamond is more compressible than solid diamond, such that the liquid density is more variable than the solid density with respect to pressure. Under a relatively low applied pressure (well, still gigapascals), diamondbergs would sink. At some phenomenal pressure, the densities would match and solid would be neutrally buoyant in liquid. Above that pressure, the atoms in liquid diamond would be more crushed together than those in the diamond lattice, and the crystal would float. The inherent strength of the cage-like solid diamond structure makes it energetically favorable, despite the atoms being farther apart.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be an especially attractive method of delivering treatment for rheumatoid arthritis if it could be made to work. As an example, among the current state of the art in rheumatoid arthritis treatment is rituximab. Rituximab is an engineered mouse/human chimeric monoclonal antibody that targets CD20, a protein unique to B-lymphocytes, whose overactivity is a major factor of RA. Because it is a monoclonal antibody, it is very expensive, and short-lived in the body. The nanoparticles used in this cancer study were made from starch and polyethylene glycol. All rituximab can really do to B cells is kill them, which gets the job done, but can leave the patient with serious immunological vulnerabilities. A more sophisticated treatment would be to use CD20-targeted nanoparticles to bind to B cells and deliver a package of siRNA that interferes selectively with the transcription/translation of genes involved only in the autoimmunity.
Well, yes and no. You are absolutely right in that this isn't a permanent effect, in the sense that the DNA of the cancer cells is not altered at all. RNA interference is like putting a defender in the game to intercept a pass; if the defender leaves the field, the receiver will be open again. Translation of the ribonucleotide reductase gene will only be blocked as long as the interfering RNA is there to block the messenger RNA. However, ribonucleotide reductase is incredibly important; it's the enzyme that tears a hydroxyl group off of ribonucleotides and makes them deoxyribonucleotides. A cell cannot make DNA without it. The notion is that cancer cells being treated with RNAi will die during the course of treatment, with no way to replace them. If you get all the cancer, there is no way for it to "bounce back," and if you miss some, then at least progression has been seriously slowed.
On the point of receptors, that raises an interesting point. The nanoparticles used in this experiment target transferrin receptor, a cell surface receptor for the iron-carrying protein transferrin. Transferrin is highly upregulated in cancer cells because iron is required by many enzymes important to cell division (including ribonucleotide reductase, incidentally). Because it is so vital, cancer cells probably cannot just stop making transferrin. Developing a mutant form of transferrin that the nanoparticles cannot adhere to is a possibility, but there'd be a very narrow window of success (success from the cancer's POV). After all, cancer develops a transferrin receptor because it needs to get iron from transferrin- the same transferrin floating in your bloodstream your healthy cells uses. So whatever stealth transferrin receptor cancer cells come up to hide from nanoparticles still has to be compatible with real transferrin, or the cancer cells will be unable to divide.
Good enough for me- that's clearly the "Nothing to see here, move along" step of the reaction, which is an important part of many industrial processes.
But oil isn't used as a catalyst in those processes. There is a lot of research into catalysts that would facilitate the splitting of water, either by electricity or by sunlight; almost all of it centers around solid structures of transition metals like platinum. The confused summary is probably referring to the steam reforming of hydrocarbons, which is by far the largest industrial source of hydrogen (but hydrocarbons are the feedstock, not a catalyst). The process produces abundant hydrogen from water and methane, but is energy-intensive and directly produces large amounts of carbon dioxide (that carbon and oxygen had to go somewhere).
There are several different formulations of magnesium-based cements, so it's hard to say what the properties of this material would be- and concrete is a complex material where small tweaks in composition can make for big alterations in attributes. I found this brochure from D_Shape (PDF) that underneath the dramatic vision-pitching gets at more of the specifics. From the description of the material, "The stone is very similar to marble," and the description of what comes out of the nozzles as "a bicomponent liquid/solid inorganic binder," it sounds like a form of magnesium oxychloride, aka Sorel cement. Sorel cement is prepared by mixing solid magnesia (MgO) with magnesium chloride brine. It goes on to mention the possibility of adding "reinforcing fibres selected from the group comprised of glass fibres, carbon fibres, nylon fibres."
Magnesium-based cements can be superior to their calcium silicate (Portland cement-like) counterparts in terms of strength, and they set very quickly, but the traditional issue they have had is that they are more susceptible to water erosion (the cured cement is more water soluble than Portland cement), and so they've been more popular for quick-patch type work rather than large-scale construction. Modern advances in its composition are improving its water resistance, however, and notably, water erosion would not be much of a problem on the moon.
Unfortunately, it is hard to break a viscous cycle. The high viscosity makes it easy to get stuck.
The number that gets dropped in the abstract is 104 W/mK. The highly oriented polyethylene fiber Dyneema has a listed thermal conductivity of 20 W/mK, so this figure would represent a significant advance from the polyethylene fibers currently out there. As you can also see, the "service temperature" for Dyneema tops out at 100C and it melts at about 150C. This new PE fiber with a higher degree of crystallinity would likely bump those numbers up slightly, but it would still be unsuitable for very high temperatures.
Since there's at least some variability, it might be best to characterize it as having a "high degree of crystallinity." Polyethylene oriented in this way sounds a lot like the ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fibers marketed as Spectra and Dyneema. Those are made by an extrusion process called gel spinning, and the polymer chains also have a high degree of crystallinity and parallel order. I don't know if the oriented nature of gel-spun UHMWPE fibers is quite at the same level and provides the same thermal properties as ones made by drawing them out with an AFM cantilever, but they might be "good enough," considering that gel spinning is a scalable industrial production method while cantilever drawing is a "very careful scientist" sort of method.
The cantilever drawing method does remind me of making nylon in freshman chemistry lab- you mix hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride together, and you can carefully pull out a nylon fiber with a stirring rod. Slightly less precise product though.
Mammals actually handle sex inheritance in an inverted arrangement from birds. Whereas mammals use the X/Y system, where males are the heterogametic type (XY) and females are the homogametic type (XX), birds (and some other animals) use a "ZW system" where males are ZZ and females are ZW. A notable feature of ZW determination is that the Z chromosome is more like a full-fledged chromosome with many genes, unlike the mammalian Y chromosome which has been paring down its genes so that it contains the sex-determining gene SRY, some genes necessary for sperm production, and little else.
This might go a long way towards explaining gynandromorphism in birds. In mammals, maleness is handled in a top-down fashion- the Y chromosome does not explicitly specify most aspects of the male phenotype, instead simply encouraging the cells that go on to make androgens, which then go on to produce a cascade of developmental effects throughout the body. In birds, the Z and W chromosomes both may have enough genes that sex determination can be handled from the bottom up, locally in each cell.
Despite my efforts to fix those exponents after pasting in the abstract, it looks like I missed one- it should read,"amplified by more than 10^4 times the bulk value," not "amplified by more than 104 times the bulk value." The above linked abstract uses superscripts, and (hopefully) contains the correct values for everything.
The "fuel" used, cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, may be better known as the explosive RDX.
A lot of denatured alcohol is now denatured with a substance called denatomium benzoate, which does not pose serious known health effects, but is unbearably bitter in even parts per million concentrations. Most times when ethyl alcohol is used in a cosmetic product, it is labeled as "denatured alcohol" or "SD alcohol 40" it contains this substance. Benzene is rarely specifically added as a denaturing agent to alcohol, on account of it being carcinogenic. Not saying it never happens, just that it requires a special lack of scruples. Benzene however is occasionally used as an azeotrope in anhydrous alcohol- to distill ethanol past around 95%, you need to set up another azeotrope that boils off earlier ( taking the water with it) and leaving absolute alcohol. So a lot of high proof industrial alcohol has traces of things like benzene or cyclohexane as a consquence of its production.
The virus involved is not completely harmless- according to the cited Nature article, it is associated with leukemia, and possibly increased susceptibility to other infections . However, it doesn't sound at all like KoRV represents the sort of threat that HIV poses in humans. HIV infection is a direct threat to the immune system since it uses the glycoprotein CD4 to gain entry into cells, and it happens that the cells covered with CD4 are essential to the immune system. HIV isn't dangerous just because it's a retrovirus, but rather because T helper cells happen to be very important. There's nothing inherently more dangerous about retroviruses or that makes their associated infections more serious. They do tend to mutate faster as a consequence of the error-prone reverse transcription process, which does often make a lasting effective treatment hard to develop.
This koala retrovirus sounds more like any of the number of transmissible leukemia viruses out there. In causing cancer, the action of a virus is usually indirect, and not associated with its viral lifecycle. When viral genes integrate into the host genome, there's a chance of breaking some important host gene- for a cell cycle regulator, growth factor, tumor supressor, etc whose malfunction leads to cancer. The cancers tend to be leukemias, lymphomas, or digestive tract cancers since those cells are frequently replaced. In humans, there are seven known viruses implicated in causing cancer, of which human T-lymphotrophic virus (causes T-cell leukemia and T-cell lymphoma in about 5% of infections) is the only retrovirus. As far as I can tell, HIV and HTLV are the only symptomatic retroviruses in humans.
Retroviruses that lead to leukemia are fairly common in the animal kingdom- there's bovine leukemia virus, feline leukemia virus, etc. The good news for the koalas is that such viruses tend to at their worst be a persistent low-level threat, but not the sort of plague that wipes populations out.
The Chinese attempted a landing before the warning- and before the conversion of Jupiter into a star. Really bad stuff did occur, because their landing attracted the native life of Europa. The reason the monolith ignited Jupiter at the story's end was in large part to give that native life a more hospitable enviroment for development by thawing the Europan ice.
Just my interpretation, but I believe that the proto-omniscient intelligence assumed that whether or not humans let their curiosity get the better of them was irrelevant since it could easily stop any attempt at landing. The implied end of the monolith's message was really "ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE. UNDERSTAND THAT IT WOULD BE NO PROBLEM AT ALL TO THWART YOUR PITIFUL EFFORTS. NOTICE THAT JUPITER IS NOW A STAR? YEAH."
And according to "2061: Odyssey Three," all attempts to send robotic probes failed when they got close- it wasn't just an idle warning; a monolith stuck around on Europa in order to protect it from interference. So while the other Galilean moons were colonized soon after Jupiter was ignited, humanity really did stay off the surface. Until a gigantic diamond hit Europa, anyway.
He collaborated on the same work in nuclear physics that Alfred Nobel is known for.
Honestly, the parent does have a point though- other than nobelium and copernicium, there seems to be a clear trend from americium (#95) onward to name elements either for their place of discovery or after important nuclear scientists. Although, you could make the case that Einstein was not primarily a nuclear physicist, and the nucleus wasn't even known when Mendeleev drew up his table, they had made important contributions to the understanding of atoms. Copernicus is certainly deserving of the honor, and there's nothing to forbid it in terms of the IUPAC rules- I just think it's interesting that a 300-year gap exists between Copernicus and the next scientist so honored. Next up: newtonium?
And (even more minor quibble) it's not even technically true that uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element on earth. Trace amounts of some transuranic elements are found in deposits of uranium ore, particularly at the natural nuclear reactor at Oklo, Gabon as a result of neutron irradiation of uranium, the same principle as used in breeder reactors.
Probably the most significant texts to undergo this process were Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements; both had been lost to Western Europe, and were thus translated in the Middle Ages to Latin from Arabic by Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath, respectively. I believe in both cases the original Greek texts were eventually recovered by the West used for later direct translations, but for a while Western Europe knew Hipparkhos/Hipparchus as "Abrachir."
Food for thought?
In the United States, since 1991, the date of Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., music samples need to be cleared by the copyright holder. That's what seems to be the real distinction here- you cannot consider literary plagarism to be analogous to music sampling because in fact legal music sampling is nothing like plagarism- works are cited, permission is requested and granted and often a considerable sum of money or share of future earnings takes place.
Attempting to factor Jack Bauer into the equation would be just like trying to divide by zero, except that when you try to divide by zero, you don't get shot in the face.
That should either be "doesn't" or "does not," and not my indecisive combination of the two, which alters meaning somewhat. On another note, I can't figure out how this liquid glass stuff is supposed to work as a product. The "liquid glass" manufacturers suggest it can be made into a spray in water or ethanol, but it apparently dries to form a waterproof coating. They claim to use no additives, but I'm not sure how aggregation of suspended silica is prevented- how is it stored in bottles without having a big slug of glass form at the bottom?
Products like Knot Wax are more like a plastic shell than a glass shell. The process takes two parts because first a coating of a resin is laid down (usually either a polyepoxide or polyurethane), and then an amine is applied to cross-link the resin molecules, leading to a very tough coating. The product discussed here appears to be a solution of short chains of silica, which when applied deposit actual glass on the surface. I'm curious about the strength of such a coating; there doesn't not appear to be any suggestion that the glass is bonded to the surface by anything stronger than van der Waals forces.
I'd assume the release dates had to do with meeting the holiday rush in Western countries. In the United States, launching later than the Friday after Thanksgiving (Nov. 27 last year) might have cost them some sales. Obviously, having product for Black Friday is not a concern for European retailers as it is in the US, but Dec. 3 still cuts close for Christmas shopping. In Japan, they could have approached the launch date a bit more leisurely.
My guess is that the difference in density may be strongly dependent on the pressure. At standard conditions, diamond is actually the densest form of pure carbon, and at atmospheric pressure, carbon sublimates instead of melting. It seems possible to me that liquid diamond is more compressible than solid diamond, such that the liquid density is more variable than the solid density with respect to pressure. Under a relatively low applied pressure (well, still gigapascals), diamondbergs would sink. At some phenomenal pressure, the densities would match and solid would be neutrally buoyant in liquid. Above that pressure, the atoms in liquid diamond would be more crushed together than those in the diamond lattice, and the crystal would float. The inherent strength of the cage-like solid diamond structure makes it energetically favorable, despite the atoms being farther apart.