Given the toughness and other properties of carbon nanotubes, does the dust tend to be like graphite, and reasonably safe as an inhalation hazard (being heavy and all), or has any kind of toxicology testing been done with them? I'd hate to see carbon nanotube fragments becoming the next asbestos.
Unfortunately nanotubes appear to be much more toxic than graphite (at least particular kinds of nanotubes, and for inhalation), leading to lung damage of types unexpected by the scientists doing the research.
I recently read a popular summary somewhere but of course don't remember exactly where. There's a fairly technical (but not unreadable) summary at from
Toxicological Sciences available online. (I think that's a freely available article.)
Likewise, I've heard that some wheat taken from an Egyptian tomb was planted and it sprouted (this was probably great for some genetic diversity study).
Nah, that seems to be an urban legend. It would be awfully cool, though! Kew Botanic Gardens talks abou it.
A house in Britain that was moved / removed. Underneath the stone and misc. flooring (which was all removed) a bunch of flowers sprouted that were totally unlike any in the area, but which matched descriptions from the middle ages of flowers at the time. But these flowers are long gone from Britain now.
This I haven't heard about. It seems unlikely to me, though. We have a reasonable idea as to what the flora of Britain was like during the Middle Ages, and where those species are now (mostly still there).
I wouldn't be surprised if there were windborne seeds and pollen in the Antarctic ice, but I'm not sure if much effort has gone into looking. It's not too likely that seeds would germinate (seeds are tough, but there are limits), but it might be possible to extract DNA. At the moment, we could compare that DNA to extant plants, but not do a whole lot else... the days of recreating "Jurassic Park" type plants is still waaay off.
New Mexico has periodic (annual, IIRC) vehicle safety inspections. If your interlock were disabled, you wouldn't get your inspection sticker and couldn't legally drive your car.
Depends on where you are... I lived in Las Cruces for 4 years (way down south), and was never required to have my car inspected. Albuquerque/Santa Fe area does have inspections, I think. But you wouldn't believe some of the things I saw on the road in Las Cruces... cars with no hoods, no windshields, (no wipers was common)...
It's also dirt cheap for license & registration, I think $25 for registration and $18 for a licence (6 years ago).
New Mexico does have a really horrible drunk driving problem, and enforcement is just about useless (even the cops admit it). The court system is overloaded, and the worst offenders just don't pay their fines & drive without a license.
Excel Solver. Or at least something of that nature that will do that kind of optimization. Please don't suggest deployment of Matlab in a work environment like this.
Except Excel is notoriously unreliable for statistics, and MicroSoft seems to be uninterested in fixing the known (for years) problems with distributions, linear regression, etc.
If you need particular kinds of stats, a tweaked Rweb server might be one option - set it up to run "canned" analyses on user data. You'd have to have a web server available, obviously, plus enough knowledge of R/Splus to set up the analyses necessary.
I have something very much like this set up with a database interface to allow my collaborators to run canned analyses (or any, if they know the R needed) on the most current data.
Okay... having gotten way afield from where I meant to go... be very, very careful using Excel for any kind of stats!
Any references for your FUD? or you just wanna make up some more units of measure?
gigaton A unit of explosive force equal to that of one billion tons of TNT.
You aren't familiar with it, so it's made up? Got it, no wonder there's so much ranting & raving going on here...
giga: SI prefix meaning 10^9 NIST (that's a govt website, but I'm assuming you might accept it as a valid source.)
ton: non-SI metric unit meaning 1000 kg ref
Non-SI metric units are commonly used in the scientific community. The SI itself is restricted to a very small set of units, and everything else is derived from those. Even common metric units like the liter aren't part of the SI.
So anyway, a gigaton is a perfectly valid and commonly used unit of mass.
As a confirmed sesquipedalian, and obsessive research-addict, how could I overlook the oportunity to learn new words? And of course, share my newfound knowledge with you all...
The OED would like us all to know:
heritrix, heretrix: A female heir or heritor; an heiress.
heritress: An heiress, an inheritress.
inheritress: A female inheritor; an heiress. (Less technical than inheritrix.)
inheritrix: Latinized fem. of INHERITOR
inheritess: not a word
And there you have it, courtesy of madmen and murderers. Well, one anyway, plus a whole collection of fellow logophiles.
What is known is it is impossible to acquire Type II diabetes if you have less than 5% body fat. A person of normal weight has zero chance of acquiring the disorder.
Less than 5%?? If you are female, you would have so many other health problems to worry about at that point that not getting diabetes wouldn't do you much good!
Even for males, that's so low as to be almost unachievable...
To be healthy, a woman _needs_ at least 10% body fat, and men at least 5%, and to get that low you need to be working really, really hard. Ideal percentages body fat for _athletes_ run more like 12-18% female / 6-15% male.
Even if you ignore the 5% figure, a person of normal weight has a low but not non-zero chance of developing type ii diabetes.
Out of curiousity, I checked the literature on the subject (by which I mean actual peer-reviewed biological journals), since most of the web sites a cursory search turned up appeared to be propaganda, either pro or con.
There isn't a whole lot, but here's some extra information (refs available on request):
Osborn et al. 2000
Minnesota, estimate 36 +/- 12 birds per year, less than one per turbine
Osborn et al. 1998 (same site):
Observed flight patterns, found that most bird flew above or below the turbine level
Johnson et al. 2002 (same site):
"We assessed effects of the wind farm on birds from 1996 to 1999, with 55 documented collision fatalities. Recovered carcasses included 42 passerines, 5 waterbirds, 3 ducks, 3 upland game birds, 1 raptor, and 1 shorebird."
De Lucas et al. 2004:
Straits of Gibralter,
most birds altered flight path to avoid turbines
Several of these researchers seem to think that turbines do kill birds, but in very small numbers compared to other structural sources of mortality. (birds hit stuff, especially plate glass windows)
The problem is that it's easy to count dead birds at the base of turbines, but hard to count birds that died from most other sources of power...
My advice is that you learn Access. Knowing another database can only help your resume. Forget about trying to improve the "big picture" for your organization, you'll never be rewarded for it. Just my 2 cents.
I've used Access, although not recently. I don't have the time or inclination to go back to it right now, learning additional software isn't part of my job except insofar as it affects my ability to perform my main research mission.
I'm not trying to improve my organization, but rather my own life. If they use the data management solution I've already cooked up, then it will save them time, but it will also greatly reduce headaches later, when we each have large datasets and want to compare results. The mySQL web solution is easily accessible in-house, and I already have standard queries "canned" for simplicity and repeatability, plus I have the whole mess linked to my favorite stats software.
A year or two down the road, I don't want to have to be spending all my time (or my support staff's time) reformatting everything one way or the other so that we can compare data.
There's no hope of improving the "big picture" for my organization, there's even been articles on slashdot about the overall hopelessness of the situation recently... I just want my life to be easy!
I'm the sole linux/open source user and advocate in a confirmed bunch of windows users. Granted, most of them are windows users because that's what everyone else is using, not because they need or want that specifically.
I have a reasonably nice mySQL database set up to manage my research data. It's set up so that anyone in-house can access it using a web browser, extract reports, etc. I think it's pretty slick, and it's orders of magnitude better than what they were using before I got here. (That would be spreadsheets, all in different formats, and all with different coding of entities. Sheesh!)
Anyway, someone else in the same building is collecting the same kind of data, identical format, just in a different region. He's got his tech building a new database in Access. As far as I can tell, this duplication of effort is just because they both have Access as part of MS Office. I keep trying to encourage them to just piggy-back on my database. Because of the web server aspect, they don't need to be running linux or mySQL themselves, so there's no "geek factor" involved. Neither of them already know Access, so whatever they do, they'll be learning it from scratch.
My feeling is that this is a wasted effort on their part. The only downside that I can think of is that I'll end up supporting their data as well as mine, since we have no IT support. From their point of view, there's no real drawbacks that I can think of, but they're still very reluctant.
Anyone have any ammunition I can use to support my case?
I was a proto-geek at a young age... when supposed to be washing dishes, I spent a lot of time making antibubbles in the suds. And regular bubbles. And, well, pretty much anything but washing dishes. Or maybe I was just a well-developed procrastinator.
If only I'd been old enough to make antibubbles in beer! Time for some make-up experimentation...
And if this is only now being studied, then I was waaaay ahead of my time.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately nanotubes appear to be much more toxic than graphite (at least particular kinds of nanotubes, and for inhalation), leading to lung damage of types unexpected by the scientists doing the research.
I recently read a popular summary somewhere but of course don't remember exactly where. There's a fairly technical (but not unreadable) summary at from Toxicological Sciences available online. (I think that's a freely available article.)
A house in Britain that was moved / removed. Underneath the stone and misc. flooring (which was all removed) a bunch of flowers sprouted that were totally unlike any in the area, but which matched descriptions from the middle ages of flowers at the time. But these flowers are long gone from Britain now.
This I haven't heard about. It seems unlikely to me, though. We have a reasonable idea as to what the flora of Britain was like during the Middle Ages, and where those species are now (mostly still there).
I wouldn't be surprised if there were windborne seeds and pollen in the Antarctic ice, but I'm not sure if much effort has gone into looking. It's not too likely that seeds would germinate (seeds are tough, but there are limits), but it might be possible to extract DNA. At the moment, we could compare that DNA to extant plants, but not do a whole lot else... the days of recreating "Jurassic Park" type plants is still waaay off.
Depends on where you are... I lived in Las Cruces for 4 years (way down south), and was never required to have my car inspected. Albuquerque/Santa Fe area does have inspections, I think. But you wouldn't believe some of the things I saw on the road in Las Cruces... cars with no hoods, no windshields, (no wipers was common)...
It's also dirt cheap for license & registration, I think $25 for registration and $18 for a licence (6 years ago).
New Mexico does have a really horrible drunk driving problem, and enforcement is just about useless (even the cops admit it). The court system is overloaded, and the worst offenders just don't pay their fines & drive without a license.
I'm glad I don't live there any more.
Except Excel is notoriously unreliable for statistics, and MicroSoft seems to be uninterested in fixing the known (for years) problems with distributions, linear regression, etc.
this has an overview and citations.
If you need particular kinds of stats, a tweaked Rweb server might be one option - set it up to run "canned" analyses on user data. You'd have to have a web server available, obviously, plus enough knowledge of R/Splus to set up the analyses necessary.
I have something very much like this set up with a database interface to allow my collaborators to run canned analyses (or any, if they know the R needed) on the most current data.
Okay... having gotten way afield from where I meant to go... be very, very careful using Excel for any kind of stats!
It keeps my relatives happy, anyway.
Welcome to the apocalypse... by your logic a female PhD posting on Slashdot has GOT to signal the end of the world, right?
gigaton A unit of explosive force equal to that of one billion tons of TNT.
You aren't familiar with it, so it's made up? Got it, no wonder there's so much ranting & raving going on here...
giga: SI prefix meaning 10^9 NIST (that's a govt website, but I'm assuming you might accept it as a valid source.)
ton: non-SI metric unit meaning 1000 kg ref
Non-SI metric units are commonly used in the scientific community. The SI itself is restricted to a very small set of units, and everything else is derived from those. Even common metric units like the liter aren't part of the SI.
So anyway, a gigaton is a perfectly valid and commonly used unit of mass.
As a confirmed sesquipedalian, and obsessive research-addict, how could I overlook the oportunity to learn new words? And of course, share my newfound knowledge with you all...
The OED would like us all to know:
heritrix, heretrix: A female heir or heritor; an heiress.
heritress: An heiress, an inheritress.
inheritress: A female inheritor; an heiress. (Less technical than inheritrix.)
inheritrix: Latinized fem. of INHERITOR
inheritess: not a word
And there you have it, courtesy of madmen and murderers. Well, one anyway, plus a whole collection of fellow logophiles.
Less than 5%?? If you are female, you would have so many other health problems to worry about at that point that not getting diabetes wouldn't do you much good!
Even for males, that's so low as to be almost unachievable...
To be healthy, a woman _needs_ at least 10% body fat, and men at least 5%, and to get that low you need to be working really, really hard. Ideal percentages body fat for _athletes_ run more like 12-18% female / 6-15% male.
Even if you ignore the 5% figure, a person of normal weight has a low but not non-zero chance of developing type ii diabetes.
There isn't a whole lot, but here's some extra information (refs available on request):
Osborn et al. 2000
Minnesota, estimate 36 +/- 12 birds per year, less than one per turbine
Osborn et al. 1998 (same site):
Observed flight patterns, found that most bird flew above or below the turbine level
Johnson et al. 2002 (same site):
"We assessed effects of the wind farm on birds from 1996 to 1999, with 55 documented collision fatalities. Recovered carcasses included 42 passerines, 5 waterbirds, 3 ducks, 3 upland game birds, 1 raptor, and 1 shorebird."
De Lucas et al. 2004:
Straits of Gibralter, most birds altered flight path to avoid turbines
Several of these researchers seem to think that turbines do kill birds, but in very small numbers compared to other structural sources of mortality. (birds hit stuff, especially plate glass windows)
The problem is that it's easy to count dead birds at the base of turbines, but hard to count birds that died from most other sources of power...
I've used Access, although not recently. I don't have the time or inclination to go back to it right now, learning additional software isn't part of my job except insofar as it affects my ability to perform my main research mission.
I'm not trying to improve my organization, but rather my own life. If they use the data management solution I've already cooked up, then it will save them time, but it will also greatly reduce headaches later, when we each have large datasets and want to compare results. The mySQL web solution is easily accessible in-house, and I already have standard queries "canned" for simplicity and repeatability, plus I have the whole mess linked to my favorite stats software.
A year or two down the road, I don't want to have to be spending all my time (or my support staff's time) reformatting everything one way or the other so that we can compare data.
There's no hope of improving the "big picture" for my organization, there's even been articles on slashdot about the overall hopelessness of the situation recently... I just want my life to be easy!
I have a reasonably nice mySQL database set up to manage my research data. It's set up so that anyone in-house can access it using a web browser, extract reports, etc. I think it's pretty slick, and it's orders of magnitude better than what they were using before I got here. (That would be spreadsheets, all in different formats, and all with different coding of entities. Sheesh!)
Anyway, someone else in the same building is collecting the same kind of data, identical format, just in a different region. He's got his tech building a new database in Access. As far as I can tell, this duplication of effort is just because they both have Access as part of MS Office. I keep trying to encourage them to just piggy-back on my database. Because of the web server aspect, they don't need to be running linux or mySQL themselves, so there's no "geek factor" involved. Neither of them already know Access, so whatever they do, they'll be learning it from scratch.
My feeling is that this is a wasted effort on their part. The only downside that I can think of is that I'll end up supporting their data as well as mine, since we have no IT support. From their point of view, there's no real drawbacks that I can think of, but they're still very reluctant.
Anyone have any ammunition I can use to support my case?
I was a proto-geek at a young age... when supposed to be washing dishes, I spent a lot of time making antibubbles in the suds. And regular bubbles. And, well, pretty much anything but washing dishes. Or maybe I was just a well-developed procrastinator. If only I'd been old enough to make antibubbles in beer! Time for some make-up experimentation... And if this is only now being studied, then I was waaaay ahead of my time.