Wegener actually proposed sea floor spreading. What was missing was the understanding of how plates act. Wegner's hypothesis, unsurprisingly given his career, had land masses acting like sheets of ice floating above rock, this wasn't indicated by the geology. Boundary ideas can be found in the 1920's. Many of the pieces of the puzzle of tectonics came together because of improved measurement, and improved understanding of the dynamics of large plates of rock. Wegener, not surprisingly given his work, looked at continental crust as floating on top of sea basalts – this was both a common view of the time, and in line with Wegener's artic experience of glaciers and ice sheets. It is this that really marks the difference between "continental drift" as a theory, which supposes that continents are "pushed" by some dynamic force, and plate tectonics, which sees plates as rising and being subducted. Improved seismology and sonar allowed for a more precise view of the earth in three dimensions.
The tectonic view is far more predictive of a wide range of phenomena, including gravity anomalies under mountain ranges, zones of vulcanism (e.g. the "ring of fire" around the pacific) and so on. Wegener's role in modern geology is somewhat similar to Lorentz' role in the development of relativity. The Lorentz contraction is an effect, but Lorentz was unable to place it within a theoretical framework which unified many other observations. Wegener did not unify the action of the mantle with the action of crust correctly. Lack of a mechanism does not stop us from studying, for example, Kepler or Newton. Newton offers no mechanism for gravitation, and Kepler no mechanism for his orbital dynamics.
Wegener died relatively young, in an attempt to save others in the arctic, and had the misfortune of being too far ahead of the available observations. He was, on a key point, simply wrong about basalt dynamics.
Wegener's evidence was hardly irrational, and there was still opposition from mainline geologists in the 1940's. That would be well after atomic decay releasing heat was well known. In fact, the first measurements of atomic decay and heat pre-dated Wegener's first publications about the existence of an "Ur-kontinent." Wegner, while foolhardy, was no irrational fantasist. He and his brother Kurt pioneered using weather balloons to map air masses, and drilling ice cores. He wrote what may be the first serious scientific study on paleo-climatology.
He didn't "just happen" to be right, he was a serious scientist who correctly observed evidence for geological change, and correctly supposed that slow gradual movement of landmasses over time was indicated.
Since a near supernova enough to increase Carbon 14 levels would leave other effects, and the flares explanation is, similarly, weak.It is just as likely there was a temporary reduction in the earth's magnetic field that allowed more ambient cosmic rays to strike earth. While this amount of variation in the magnetic field is high, it isn't out of range of other events. It has the further advantage of not leaving a large number of highly visible effects, except for very strong auroras, which, given the date, might not have been recorded frequently or unequivocally enough.
of any service that doesn't turn our personal data over to the police. The reliability of commercial services in selling private data to law enforcement is unsurpassed, and it is a fatal flaw of OSM not to do the same thing.
The vast majority of musicians and composers make no royalties at all, and of the rest, most do not make enough to live performing or composing. Copyright is a benefit to "the.1%" and not very much benefit to others.
I say this as someone who has actually gotten royalties. Artists, in general, must either work for nothing, or sign away their rights as part of getting distribution.
Copyright is about pipes, not content, in that corporate entities get the vast majority of royalties, directly, or indirectly in that they charge recording artists for "services" out of royalties. The pipe owners, as owners of rights of way often do, take virtually all the value of what is moved over them. And in our case are demanding a surveillance state enforce their ownership, as happened, for example, with the railroads in the 19th century. The people who own the pipes should be paid, but not at the cost of basic liberties. If someone cannot be paid without infringing on basic liberties, what they are doing probably isn't worth what they think they should be paid. The problem with making information rival and exclusive is that it more valuable generally as neither, and since it does not have a good physical analog, chain of possession does not make a good proxy for ownership.
What needs to be paid for then, is not really the artists in most cases, but the entire expensive apparatus of creating large artifacts, and distributing them, which means as much crowding out smaller footprint forms of art. There are thousands of people in the recording industry making a good living off of WA Mozart, none of them, however, are WA Mozart. Bartok's estate still gets royalties, but that does not help Bela Bartok. For all the good that the copyright system does most artists, they might as well be dead. However it takes legions of people to control and promote pop art, and without the huge flow of money associated with mass media, they would not exist, and could not be paid. Nor could media moghuls like Murdoch afford to buy and sell politicians. The money does not pay for art, but to support a system which is, at this point, largely about itself.
While the current intensive pop system could not survive without copyright, a knowledge based system can. If our goal was paying artists, the system created would not look anything like the present perpetual copyright with a spy state enforcing it. We also wouldn't ever use the term "intellectual property" because it would be an obvious oxymoron.
The way to get back into the industry is to start with having a portfolio: write an App, get it on the app store. This is one of the most persuasive arguments for hiring you, and because app writing for either Android or iOS is relatively new, there is a lower bar to entry for it. There is also the very very very off chance that the app will make money, and you can skip the rest of the plan.
Second, realize that your first job back in will be the job from hell. Look for companies from hell that churn and burn through people fast. High turnover, lousy management, death march projects. They are always hiring. You will do this for 6 months. You will not sleep for six month, and will seriously consider setting up your own gin still because nothing else will be fast enough or cheap enough.
Third, realize your second job will be the sh*ttiest work you know of. Grunt work for a good company that just needs a pair of hands. You will do this for 6 months. At that point, you have a portfolio, a year in the system, and it will not be hard to leverage the two references you have, plus contacts, because churn and burn will often have people escaping to good companies, and you are back in.
This process will take about 18 months from one side to the other, and you will go to more job interviews and be turned down by more of them.
There, that's the plan, it will work if you live anywhere near a metropolitan area with companies that have bad IT departments, which means any one of the top 200 metro areas in North America will do.
It may not be what you want to do, but there it is.
It's not a spill, the coolant is inside the reactor, which means that the corrosion occurs inside the reactor vessel. Why build a low efficiency unproven reactor design that gets, at best, 20 year out of thorium availability and leaves behind radioactive acid salts with a chance of Chernobyl style failure and is specialized for one fuel mix, when fast breeder gas cooled reactors have a larger potential fuel supply, better efficiency, are safer in their failure modes, and can be standardized for a number of different fuel? The breeder thorium chain in a breeder context is considerably more efficient. However, it means waiting and not building what is essentially a sexed up Russian sub propulsion unit now.
For those wanting pay outs now, and the ability to dump the problems forward, molten salt reactors are a compelling profit opportunity. From the point of view of long term economic viability however, fast breeding of thorium is far superior. Doing energy wrong now is one of our problems. However, fast technologies are farther out, and will require a very different approach to the development of nuclear energy.
The problem is the corrosion of the cooling salts and the high temperature that they operate under, the two primary problems have either been the coolant dropping below its phase transition, at which point heat builds up in the reactor, or a burn through of the cooling system, at which point the molten coolant spills out, heating whatever is surrounding it rapidly, and causing the reaction vessel to overheat. Since the preferred salt mix is a fluorine based salt, when the the salt breaks down at this point, there several failure chains that lead to what is euphemistically known as "energetic disassembly." One of the most troubling is contamination with water that creates HF, and a vicious cycle forms: acid eats the piping and containment, which produces more HF, which ionizes into Hydrogen and Fluorine gas.
Bottom line here is that building reactors to dispose of thorium by-product directly is an inherently problematic enterprise, since it has many of the same problems as light water actively cooled generation, and then adds more besides. It isn't impossible, but the present generation is being pushed before the technology is mature because there is a thorium problem growing now, even though the reactor technology is not ready for deployment at scale.
A great deal more austerity. However, it makes a rather weak argument about a very real trade off problem, that problem is the water-energy trade off problem. In almost all forms of energy generation, it is not usable energy that is created directly, instead, heat is generated, the heat is used to do work, and the work is used to store the energy. So, the classic steam turbine has water heated to gas, and the resulting steam spins the turbine, and that carries wires through a magnetic field, which generates a corresponding electrical current, and that current is sent down wires. Another water energy trade off is to have wind turbines pump water up a shaft, which then is allowed to fall, spinning turbines, when power is needed. Bio-fuels, the same way: water is used to grow plants, the plants fix sunlight into hydrocarbons.
The solution to the water energy problem is more energy, because energy can be used to get water. This, however, lowers the Life Cycle Output of the energy system. LCO or LCA is the expected usable energy out, divided by the expected usable energy used to create and run a system. So if a system produces 10 watts for every watt it takes to build, run, and dispose of it, then its LCA is 10. The 20th century got by on a miracle: namely petroleum has a high LCA, and its its own storage mechanism. Gasoline has great power to weight storage capacities with internal combustion. And internal combustion engines can be built of very cheap metals. There are many quandaries in replacing hydro-carbon energy, and the water energy trade off that the piece mentions is one of them, but it is one of scale. Once there is a large enough renewable base, then the low LCA that getting the water to run it has, is not a problem. It is at the beginning, when the return is eaten through by the water problem, because there are competing uses for water that have much higher economic returns in the short run, such as airconditioning and agriculture. None of these uses want to pay much higher rates for water so that people not yet born can have the advantages.
Where the article falls down is pressing an agenda, and making sloppy equivalences. The first is equating capital requirements with expendable requirements: we don't burn the rare earths we use in kinetic energy extraction – that is water, wind, and geothermal – and in fact, rare earths, are not, as a percentage of the earth's crust, all that rare. For example, wikipedia has this chart. It shows that all of the Lanthanide rare earths, plus scandium and yttrium, are more common than either gold or silver, many are more common than tin, and some more common than lead. The problem with them is that they tend to be found near the Actinide rare earths, particularly Thorium. If you have seen a press for "Thorium reactors" it is because exploitation of rare earths leads to Thorium by product, and reactors which burn it would be fantastically profitable, for the people who sell the rare earths. In reality, they have the same problems, only more so, of actively cooled salt reactors. Namely, they work until they blow up. The Chinese dump their Thorium in a holding lack, which, should it break, would contaminate large areas of land and volumes of water.
Side note: how is it that a browser's spell check doesn't know Actinide?
But for all of that, rare earths are not burned, the way for example Lithuium is not burned in a battery and can be recycled. These are recyclable, which is different from consumable. Hence moving from consumption of hydrocarbons, which really are burned, to using rare earths in capital energy, is a positive step, and while the author of the paper implies that there would be rare earth shortages, the reality is that this is not the case, and substitutes in the form of ceramics and active magnets (See Rare Earth Prices Plunge as Manufacturers turn to substitutes
The most promising wimp is a particle known as the neutralino. This is a hypothesized particle which would exist in either super-symmetrical theories. Super-symmetry says that in an unbroken general theory, every boson - a particle like a photon with an integer spin - has a fermion - 1/2 spin - partner, with the difference being that the fermion has a spin of 1/2. Since we don't seen bosons and fermions of the same energy, if, and it is still if, there was super-symmetry, it is a broken symmetry.
The neutralino would be a composite particle, composed of the super-partners of the guage bosons and the higgs - that is wino (w partner), higgsino (higgs parnter), bino (partner of the weak hypercharge). Since the symmetry is broken, we don't see the original super-partners, only their super-imposed forms with the same mass eigenstate.
When particles annihilate, they produce a set of particles that have a quantum number of 0. Any particles with the same mass-energy as the original colliding pair of particle and anti-particle can be produced. If mass energies are low, this means that the result will be mostly photons, because photons have no mass, and are only energy. That is, they have a low total mass energy. But any particles can be produced, so long as the result totals to 0, and has the same mass energy.
Neutralinos, as you would guess, from the term WIMP, are weakly interacting, and massive. That means that when a neutralino annihilates another, particles with greater mass energy can be produced.
In a 1994 paper Drees et al calculated neutralino decay into gluons. One of the co-authors here Kamionkowski went on to publish more on dark matter and neutralinos. There have been other papers on other possible decay products from neutralino annihilation, because, of course, if annihilation produces unstable particles, or anti-particle pairs, it can keep going until it reaches an end state of stable products. However, not all anti-particle pairs produce annihilate, and if the products are stable, they go bouncing on their merry way.
This means that anti-protons and positrons above the background, and at certain energy levels could be the signature of neutralino dark matter.
Or to roll things back: one of the few ways, other than gravity, we can detect WIMPS is from their annihilations. To determine if, and if so, what, WIMPs are composed of, we have to look at the decay products of those events. The Pamela data shows that there is an excess of positrons, however, it does not show that this excess is from WIMP annihilation. The search for this spectrum is important for both large and small reasons: large because cosmology evolves based on mass, and small because neutralinos, if detected, tell us about the final broken super-symmetrical extensions to the Standard Model, and in turn tell us about the super-partners, and, in turn, about the partners. For example, we have not seen a higgs boson, but a neutralino is an eigenstate of a higgsino fermion, which implies a higgs boson to be partnered with.
Back in the 1990's Drees et al published
Let me introduce you to what can be called the "Garden World Imperative." Right now, and for a considerable future, the Earth is the only garden world, that may change, but at the moment, it is true. This means that resource extraction, the mineral resources you talk about, has to occur within the context of protecting the garden world, and having fall back in case of failure. Even today many resource extraction activities, including the burning of carbon, damage the very stability of the garden world.
This means that even if various elements are on earth in relative abundance, the cost of extracting them, while protecting the garden world's equilibrium within parameters that we prefer, is going to get more expensive rapidly. Right now this is masked by the willingness of many countries to spill out externalities, both in the present and in the future, in order to get the technology and capital to develop. However, much of China's arable land is contaminated, and chunks of Japan are about to be off limits for farming because of Daichi. Space is someplace where these extraction and processing events can be done, with much lower risk and damage.
So the most precious earth resource is the gaia stability it has, the other resources are going to rapidly be more expensive than they are marginally worth, because of the risk that extraction causes. That is ultimate economic reason we are going to go into space: because eventually it will be cheaper to use magnetic propulsion to ship materials back to Earth, than it will be to either reduce waste in their creation, or reduce their use on earth. Already there is a massive increase in the intrusiveness of government in ordinary lives, and it is driven in part because at the moment it is cheaper to create a virtual police state, than it is to reach out into space. However, this is a false calculation, because the return on a virtual police state is negative, and what is more, it is a increasingly negative curve –not just a negative slope, but a negative curvature. On the converse space exploration has positive returns that keep getting larger over time.
The cross over point is coming, and what is more, it will be a rapid phase change. One day the international corporate-sovereign system of resource rents and capital oligopolies is running along, if not optimally, and soon there afterwards riots, depletions, economic collapse, and social withdrawal make it impossible to maintain. This has happened before: Europe didn't being exploring and conquering the world because things were great back home. New worlds to conquer often happens when the old ones can not bear the strain.
The question was only when the pressure from state governments for the revenue became strong enough. With state revenues still down because of the economic downturn, it seems likely that its time has come.
With the battles between California and Amazon as a foreshadowing, it may be that there will be some sort of phased in deal first.
The time to on about this was a decade ago when the DoHs was created. However, that's James Fallows. I remember clearly his 1987 series of articles on how the Japanese model of national economics was poised to overwhelm Anglo-Capitalism, and his weak questioning of the Iraq War in 2003, after the decision to go to war had already been made.
The Department of Homeland Security is a mess, mind you, but that's as much implementation as anything else, it's designed to make it possible for Congress to monitor the security pork better, which had previously been scattered through the Federal Government, and therefore had no single cabinet secretary that could be brought in to testify and question, and no single budget bill to cut deals over. The problem is not the department, as much as it is that the United States has a pervasive fear in its population. For example, take a look at this gallup poll trend over the years on perceptions of crime: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150464/Americans-Believe-Crime-Worsening.aspx and then compare it to actual violent crime rates. Americans by a large margin believe that crime is getting worse, when, in fact, violent crime is going down. Note that the graph strongly corresponds to rhetoric on crime, and to personal economic, as opposed to physical, insecurity.
It does not matter what the department is called, as long as Americans vastly over-rate the chances of dying in criminal or terrorist attacks, particularly in crimes committed by strangers or foreigners, as opposed to the far more likely case of being killed by someone they know. Statistically speaking, suicide is more common that homicide, and among homicide categories, being killed by a current or former romantic partner outweighs all other categories. But that's not what DoHs monitors by and large. Instead looked at in an unbiased fashion, for example this post at Reason magazine, http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/11/dont-be-terrorized terrorism is a lower risk that we run going out to drive, or consuming ordinary products.
It isn't that that Antartica is isolated from the rest of the globe, it is that the process of cracking and calving icebergs is part of the normal hydrologic cycle: glaciers crack, calve, form icebergs, the icebergs melt, lowering the salinity of the ocean, which evaporates and produces new precipitation. Some of this lands as snow, and an equilibrium is reached. Yes, periods of warming and cooling change this equilibrium, including natural and human driven changes.
However, before we can make intelligent investigation into how human activity changes the process, we have to understand the process, often much better than we do. The reason this event is important is not because we can ascribe it to a greenhouse gases, but that we are looking at a major calving event from very early on. It is like looking for star formation, or cracks that become volcanic eruptions. It's natural forces in action, and a chance to improve our theories of ice flow and formation, which, in turn, will improve our models of climate.
You should look up the epic of iceberg B-15, for a time "the largest floating thing on the planet." It was one of the Icebergs that calved from the break up of the Ross Ice Shelf, and 11,000 km^2 – that's the size of Jamaica, Bylot, or Bloshevik Island, and larger than the "big island" of Hawai'i. It broke apart several times, bashed into the Drygalski Ice Tongue, gouging out an 8km^2 piece, and floated on, breaking into smaller pieces, though some of its remains are still wandering around the Antarctic Ocean.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/ESAAQTTHN6D_index_0.html [ESA]
The ESA has a great deal of imagery on it.
As one of the readers who mentioned this in a submission:
http://video.stv.tv/bc/ITN_041111_worldICEBERG04/?redirect=no
is a good short video story version on this, including some graphics on ice flows and pictures of the crack. Quite well done.
Not this isn't a GW/CC event, but it is a chance to see the formation of a crack in progress, which we do not always catch. All icebergs start with this cracking process, and icebergs form in warm and cold periods of history. Understanding the ice dynamics of how flows of build up turn into stress is the ice equivalent of studying plate tectonics: the science of large solid plates bending, cracking, and then failing.
Because it hints at being able to model biological systems with robots, and make comparative analysis of the different advantages that might be gained. Since many features evolve in parallel, it can also be used to judge the relative chance of rapid versus gradual evolution. Good catch sciencehabit.
Slashdot Mirror
Not over a short flux, which is all that would be required.
The tectonic view is far more predictive of a wide range of phenomena, including gravity anomalies under mountain ranges, zones of vulcanism (e.g. the "ring of fire" around the pacific) and so on. Wegener's role in modern geology is somewhat similar to Lorentz' role in the development of relativity. The Lorentz contraction is an effect, but Lorentz was unable to place it within a theoretical framework which unified many other observations. Wegener did not unify the action of the mantle with the action of crust correctly. Lack of a mechanism does not stop us from studying, for example, Kepler or Newton. Newton offers no mechanism for gravitation, and Kepler no mechanism for his orbital dynamics.
Wegener died relatively young, in an attempt to save others in the arctic, and had the misfortune of being too far ahead of the available observations. He was, on a key point, simply wrong about basalt dynamics.
He didn't "just happen" to be right, he was a serious scientist who correctly observed evidence for geological change, and correctly supposed that slow gradual movement of landmasses over time was indicated.
Not it just means an adjustment to c14 dating. It would not affect the shroud of turin, since it is clearly from well after 775.
Since a near supernova enough to increase Carbon 14 levels would leave other effects, and the flares explanation is, similarly, weak.It is just as likely there was a temporary reduction in the earth's magnetic field that allowed more ambient cosmic rays to strike earth. While this amount of variation in the magnetic field is high, it isn't out of range of other events. It has the further advantage of not leaving a large number of highly visible effects, except for very strong auroras, which, given the date, might not have been recorded frequently or unequivocally enough.
The Gingrich Revolution is too far to the left for the current House of Representatives.
of any service that doesn't turn our personal data over to the police. The reliability of commercial services in selling private data to law enforcement is unsurpassed, and it is a fatal flaw of OSM not to do the same thing.
As with x-ray lensing, the question was of feasibility for certain applications.
I say this as someone who has actually gotten royalties. Artists, in general, must either work for nothing, or sign away their rights as part of getting distribution.
Copyright is about pipes, not content, in that corporate entities get the vast majority of royalties, directly, or indirectly in that they charge recording artists for "services" out of royalties. The pipe owners, as owners of rights of way often do, take virtually all the value of what is moved over them. And in our case are demanding a surveillance state enforce their ownership, as happened, for example, with the railroads in the 19th century. The people who own the pipes should be paid, but not at the cost of basic liberties. If someone cannot be paid without infringing on basic liberties, what they are doing probably isn't worth what they think they should be paid. The problem with making information rival and exclusive is that it more valuable generally as neither, and since it does not have a good physical analog, chain of possession does not make a good proxy for ownership.
What needs to be paid for then, is not really the artists in most cases, but the entire expensive apparatus of creating large artifacts, and distributing them, which means as much crowding out smaller footprint forms of art. There are thousands of people in the recording industry making a good living off of WA Mozart, none of them, however, are WA Mozart. Bartok's estate still gets royalties, but that does not help Bela Bartok. For all the good that the copyright system does most artists, they might as well be dead. However it takes legions of people to control and promote pop art, and without the huge flow of money associated with mass media, they would not exist, and could not be paid. Nor could media moghuls like Murdoch afford to buy and sell politicians. The money does not pay for art, but to support a system which is, at this point, largely about itself.
While the current intensive pop system could not survive without copyright, a knowledge based system can. If our goal was paying artists, the system created would not look anything like the present perpetual copyright with a spy state enforcing it. We also wouldn't ever use the term "intellectual property" because it would be an obvious oxymoron.
This is called "your bibliography" and the process your "intellectual apparatus." That is to say, what a degree is supposed to teach and enforce.
There are peered open journals, and peers for pay journals are not paid. Pay journals are relying on legacy rent.
The way to get back into the industry is to start with having a portfolio: write an App, get it on the app store. This is one of the most persuasive arguments for hiring you, and because app writing for either Android or iOS is relatively new, there is a lower bar to entry for it. There is also the very very very off chance that the app will make money, and you can skip the rest of the plan. Second, realize that your first job back in will be the job from hell. Look for companies from hell that churn and burn through people fast. High turnover, lousy management, death march projects. They are always hiring. You will do this for 6 months. You will not sleep for six month, and will seriously consider setting up your own gin still because nothing else will be fast enough or cheap enough. Third, realize your second job will be the sh*ttiest work you know of. Grunt work for a good company that just needs a pair of hands. You will do this for 6 months. At that point, you have a portfolio, a year in the system, and it will not be hard to leverage the two references you have, plus contacts, because churn and burn will often have people escaping to good companies, and you are back in. This process will take about 18 months from one side to the other, and you will go to more job interviews and be turned down by more of them. There, that's the plan, it will work if you live anywhere near a metropolitan area with companies that have bad IT departments, which means any one of the top 200 metro areas in North America will do. It may not be what you want to do, but there it is.
Slow, expensive, or wrong. Why compromise, you can have them all.
For those wanting pay outs now, and the ability to dump the problems forward, molten salt reactors are a compelling profit opportunity. From the point of view of long term economic viability however, fast breeding of thorium is far superior. Doing energy wrong now is one of our problems. However, fast technologies are farther out, and will require a very different approach to the development of nuclear energy.
Bottom line here is that building reactors to dispose of thorium by-product directly is an inherently problematic enterprise, since it has many of the same problems as light water actively cooled generation, and then adds more besides. It isn't impossible, but the present generation is being pushed before the technology is mature because there is a thorium problem growing now, even though the reactor technology is not ready for deployment at scale.
The solution to the water energy problem is more energy, because energy can be used to get water. This, however, lowers the Life Cycle Output of the energy system. LCO or LCA is the expected usable energy out, divided by the expected usable energy used to create and run a system. So if a system produces 10 watts for every watt it takes to build, run, and dispose of it, then its LCA is 10. The 20th century got by on a miracle: namely petroleum has a high LCA, and its its own storage mechanism. Gasoline has great power to weight storage capacities with internal combustion. And internal combustion engines can be built of very cheap metals. There are many quandaries in replacing hydro-carbon energy, and the water energy trade off that the piece mentions is one of them, but it is one of scale. Once there is a large enough renewable base, then the low LCA that getting the water to run it has, is not a problem. It is at the beginning, when the return is eaten through by the water problem, because there are competing uses for water that have much higher economic returns in the short run, such as airconditioning and agriculture. None of these uses want to pay much higher rates for water so that people not yet born can have the advantages.
Where the article falls down is pressing an agenda, and making sloppy equivalences. The first is equating capital requirements with expendable requirements: we don't burn the rare earths we use in kinetic energy extraction – that is water, wind, and geothermal – and in fact, rare earths, are not, as a percentage of the earth's crust, all that rare. For example, wikipedia has this chart. It shows that all of the Lanthanide rare earths, plus scandium and yttrium, are more common than either gold or silver, many are more common than tin, and some more common than lead. The problem with them is that they tend to be found near the Actinide rare earths, particularly Thorium. If you have seen a press for "Thorium reactors" it is because exploitation of rare earths leads to Thorium by product, and reactors which burn it would be fantastically profitable, for the people who sell the rare earths. In reality, they have the same problems, only more so, of actively cooled salt reactors. Namely, they work until they blow up. The Chinese dump their Thorium in a holding lack, which, should it break, would contaminate large areas of land and volumes of water.
Side note: how is it that a browser's spell check doesn't know Actinide?
But for all of that, rare earths are not burned, the way for example Lithuium is not burned in a battery and can be recycled. These are recyclable, which is different from consumable. Hence moving from consumption of hydrocarbons, which really are burned, to using rare earths in capital energy, is a positive step, and while the author of the paper implies that there would be rare earth shortages, the reality is that this is not the case, and substitutes in the form of ceramics and active magnets (See Rare Earth Prices Plunge as Manufacturers turn to substitutes
The neutralino would be a composite particle, composed of the super-partners of the guage bosons and the higgs - that is wino (w partner), higgsino (higgs parnter), bino (partner of the weak hypercharge). Since the symmetry is broken, we don't see the original super-partners, only their super-imposed forms with the same mass eigenstate.
When particles annihilate, they produce a set of particles that have a quantum number of 0. Any particles with the same mass-energy as the original colliding pair of particle and anti-particle can be produced. If mass energies are low, this means that the result will be mostly photons, because photons have no mass, and are only energy. That is, they have a low total mass energy. But any particles can be produced, so long as the result totals to 0, and has the same mass energy.
Neutralinos, as you would guess, from the term WIMP, are weakly interacting, and massive. That means that when a neutralino annihilates another, particles with greater mass energy can be produced.
In a 1994 paper Drees et al calculated neutralino decay into gluons. One of the co-authors here Kamionkowski went on to publish more on dark matter and neutralinos. There have been other papers on other possible decay products from neutralino annihilation, because, of course, if annihilation produces unstable particles, or anti-particle pairs, it can keep going until it reaches an end state of stable products. However, not all anti-particle pairs produce annihilate, and if the products are stable, they go bouncing on their merry way.
This means that anti-protons and positrons above the background, and at certain energy levels could be the signature of neutralino dark matter.
Or to roll things back: one of the few ways, other than gravity, we can detect WIMPS is from their annihilations. To determine if, and if so, what, WIMPs are composed of, we have to look at the decay products of those events. The Pamela data shows that there is an excess of positrons, however, it does not show that this excess is from WIMP annihilation. The search for this spectrum is important for both large and small reasons: large because cosmology evolves based on mass, and small because neutralinos, if detected, tell us about the final broken super-symmetrical extensions to the Standard Model, and in turn tell us about the super-partners, and, in turn, about the partners. For example, we have not seen a higgs boson, but a neutralino is an eigenstate of a higgsino fermion, which implies a higgs boson to be partnered with. Back in the 1990's Drees et al published
In the present, police departments are already arresting people for video tapping them.
Let me introduce you to what can be called the "Garden World Imperative." Right now, and for a considerable future, the Earth is the only garden world, that may change, but at the moment, it is true. This means that resource extraction, the mineral resources you talk about, has to occur within the context of protecting the garden world, and having fall back in case of failure. Even today many resource extraction activities, including the burning of carbon, damage the very stability of the garden world.
This means that even if various elements are on earth in relative abundance, the cost of extracting them, while protecting the garden world's equilibrium within parameters that we prefer, is going to get more expensive rapidly. Right now this is masked by the willingness of many countries to spill out externalities, both in the present and in the future, in order to get the technology and capital to develop. However, much of China's arable land is contaminated, and chunks of Japan are about to be off limits for farming because of Daichi. Space is someplace where these extraction and processing events can be done, with much lower risk and damage.
So the most precious earth resource is the gaia stability it has, the other resources are going to rapidly be more expensive than they are marginally worth, because of the risk that extraction causes. That is ultimate economic reason we are going to go into space: because eventually it will be cheaper to use magnetic propulsion to ship materials back to Earth, than it will be to either reduce waste in their creation, or reduce their use on earth. Already there is a massive increase in the intrusiveness of government in ordinary lives, and it is driven in part because at the moment it is cheaper to create a virtual police state, than it is to reach out into space. However, this is a false calculation, because the return on a virtual police state is negative, and what is more, it is a increasingly negative curve –not just a negative slope, but a negative curvature. On the converse space exploration has positive returns that keep getting larger over time.
The cross over point is coming, and what is more, it will be a rapid phase change. One day the international corporate-sovereign system of resource rents and capital oligopolies is running along, if not optimally, and soon there afterwards riots, depletions, economic collapse, and social withdrawal make it impossible to maintain. This has happened before: Europe didn't being exploring and conquering the world because things were great back home. New worlds to conquer often happens when the old ones can not bear the strain.
The question was only when the pressure from state governments for the revenue became strong enough. With state revenues still down because of the economic downturn, it seems likely that its time has come.
With the battles between California and Amazon as a foreshadowing, it may be that there will be some sort of phased in deal first.
The Department of Homeland Security is a mess, mind you, but that's as much implementation as anything else, it's designed to make it possible for Congress to monitor the security pork better, which had previously been scattered through the Federal Government, and therefore had no single cabinet secretary that could be brought in to testify and question, and no single budget bill to cut deals over. The problem is not the department, as much as it is that the United States has a pervasive fear in its population. For example, take a look at this gallup poll trend over the years on perceptions of crime: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150464/Americans-Believe-Crime-Worsening.aspx and then compare it to actual violent crime rates. Americans by a large margin believe that crime is getting worse, when, in fact, violent crime is going down. Note that the graph strongly corresponds to rhetoric on crime, and to personal economic, as opposed to physical, insecurity.
It does not matter what the department is called, as long as Americans vastly over-rate the chances of dying in criminal or terrorist attacks, particularly in crimes committed by strangers or foreigners, as opposed to the far more likely case of being killed by someone they know. Statistically speaking, suicide is more common that homicide, and among homicide categories, being killed by a current or former romantic partner outweighs all other categories. But that's not what DoHs monitors by and large. Instead looked at in an unbiased fashion, for example this post at Reason magazine, http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/11/dont-be-terrorized terrorism is a lower risk that we run going out to drive, or consuming ordinary products.
It isn't that that Antartica is isolated from the rest of the globe, it is that the process of cracking and calving icebergs is part of the normal hydrologic cycle: glaciers crack, calve, form icebergs, the icebergs melt, lowering the salinity of the ocean, which evaporates and produces new precipitation. Some of this lands as snow, and an equilibrium is reached. Yes, periods of warming and cooling change this equilibrium, including natural and human driven changes.
However, before we can make intelligent investigation into how human activity changes the process, we have to understand the process, often much better than we do. The reason this event is important is not because we can ascribe it to a greenhouse gases, but that we are looking at a major calving event from very early on. It is like looking for star formation, or cracks that become volcanic eruptions. It's natural forces in action, and a chance to improve our theories of ice flow and formation, which, in turn, will improve our models of climate.
You should look up the epic of iceberg B-15, for a time "the largest floating thing on the planet." It was one of the Icebergs that calved from the break up of the Ross Ice Shelf, and 11,000 km^2 – that's the size of Jamaica, Bylot, or Bloshevik Island, and larger than the "big island" of Hawai'i. It broke apart several times, bashed into the Drygalski Ice Tongue, gouging out an 8km^2 piece, and floated on, breaking into smaller pieces, though some of its remains are still wandering around the Antarctic Ocean.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/ESAAQTTHN6D_index_0.html [ESA]
The ESA has a great deal of imagery on it.
As one of the readers who mentioned this in a submission: http://video.stv.tv/bc/ITN_041111_worldICEBERG04/?redirect=no is a good short video story version on this, including some graphics on ice flows and pictures of the crack. Quite well done. Not this isn't a GW/CC event, but it is a chance to see the formation of a crack in progress, which we do not always catch. All icebergs start with this cracking process, and icebergs form in warm and cold periods of history. Understanding the ice dynamics of how flows of build up turn into stress is the ice equivalent of studying plate tectonics: the science of large solid plates bending, cracking, and then failing.
Because it hints at being able to model biological systems with robots, and make comparative analysis of the different advantages that might be gained. Since many features evolve in parallel, it can also be used to judge the relative chance of rapid versus gradual evolution. Good catch sciencehabit.