in the digital world, there is very little difference between "viewing" and "downloading" so where will the line be drawn? Very simple, if you paid for it, there's a tax the price you paid. No one is planning on taxing free internet radio or YouTube.
California is facing some enormous budget shortfalls and the Democratic controlled state legislature simply will not cut state spending. Arnold (by no means a hard right winger), tried to cut spending but met with a hailstorm of resistance in a state whose politics are dominated by powerful unions. That's definitely not true. While there are arguments over how much to cut, even Arnold has said that the state needs to look for new sources of revenue.
Democrats in California have already been arguing for a tax increase, and in that environment, saying that sales taxes have to be paid on internet items might be politically the easiest thing for them to do. After all, they could argue, somewhat disingenously - why should everyone else pay taxes, but internet businesses not? Why would this argument be disingenuous? And no one is claiming that the internet businesses should be taxed. In a sales tax, the consumer pays, not the producer.
Having the use of the SLC linac certainly made life easier for LCLS, but XFEL is being built on completely virgin ground. If (and it's more of an "if" than a lot of people want to admit) LCLS works, then the demand for X-FELs will be *huge*. There are rumours of a second being planned at SLAC, and one in the UK. These machines are very very cool, and stunningly useful for many other fields of research. I'd bet they won't be able to build these machines fast enough to satisfy demand!
I've never heard of that before, (specifically the second one at SLAC, would it use electron beams from the existing linac or a new one?). The only thing I've heard of is that there are talks of possibly turning PEP-II into a extremely low emittance synchrotron radiation source,a la PETRA, since there's basically not going to be any more accelerator based particle physics at SLAC. Are there really questions as to whether the LCLS will work (i.e., meet its stated design parameters), or do they center more around its actual utility?
It's true that accelerator science has been driven by HEP, but most accelerator physicists (like me) will admit that their market is changing, and our future customers will be biologists and chemists, not physicists. I hope so, because it's a really amazing field, but I don't see much of a demand for advances in the field from chemistry/biology/applied physicists. As far as I can tell there isn't much of a point to building synchrotrons of an energy higher than 9-10 GeV. Even greater brightness isn't of much use anymore, at least in X-ray crystallography (according to the people I have talked to, IANAC(rystallographer)). The only thing that can really seems to be of use now is lowering emittance, which is not as monumental of a technical challenge as perfecting higher frequency klystrons, etc.
I've never heard the story about XFEL being hampered by length. Do you mean the German one, or were you referring to LCLS?
I was referring to the German one. I heard a story at SLAC from a presenter from DESY in which he said that there were a bunch of bureaucratic hassles with the linac for the XFEL since it extended into another county. (He wasn't actually working on the project though, and didn't say that it ended up causing any specific problems.) I think the main issue is the sheer cost of building something like that, according to the XFEL's website, construction costs 968 million Euros. That's only construction costs. At current (Google) exchange rates, that's about $1.5 billion and I don't think there are many countries willing to shell out that kind of money. On the other hand, the newest light source under design, NSLS-II, will cost a total of about $750-900 million (there are conflicting reports) and that's including the little R & D they need to do. For a more current example, DIAMOND, the new UK synchrotron, cost only 260 million pounds plus 160 million pounds for additional beamlines for a total 835 million dollars. New light sources such as 4GLS in Britain, an ERL and FEL combination of sorts, have been cancelled. I really don't think they are going to be that many new XFELs. At the very least I doublt they will become anywhere as common as synchrotron radiation sources, of which there at least 4 in the US with large user groups (APS, ALS, SSRL, NSLS).
If you think this stuff is cool, then LCLS and XFEL will blow you away when they come online. These are great times for accelerator physics, and great times for light sources (unless, of course, LHC destroys us all:S).
True, the LCLS and XFEL are going to be awesome, but I don't know how well accelerator physics will do. Admittedly, more countries seem into making their own synchrotron light facilities. But the LCLS wouldn't have been built if it weren't for the linac lying around that had been built ~40 years ago . And despite their uses in light sources, accelerator physics still seems to be greatly driven by HEP, not photon science. There isn't going to be a rush to build XFELs everywhere, since two mile long linacs take up a lot of space. I've even heard that the XFEL was slightly hampered because the end of the tunnel extends into another county.
These things absorb almost anything to the left of infrared or to the right of UV-B.
That's not really true, (at least for the left of infrared telescopes). There are a relatively small set of frequencies absorbed by water and/or reflected by the ionosphere. But a good deal of stuff is let through. Otherwise radio astronomy would be pretty useless. And last time I checked astronomers weren't complaining about their giant arrays of dish antennas being entirely useless.
As I understand it, a "hole" is just the absence of an electron, which leads to a net positive charge for a particular atom. Kind of like a positive ion, but I think use of the term "ion" is limited to liquid solutions/gases/plasmas.
First of all, holes are not the result of net positive charges in an atom. In silicon, you can create holes by replacing a silicon atom in the crystal lattice with a boron atom. Silicon has 4 valence electrons, but boron only has 3. Therefore, the silicon atom that is replaced by the boron could form 4 bonds with neighboring silicon atoms. The boron can only form 3. The remaining empty space is what we call a hole. Note that nothing is electrically charged.
An electron can move and fill a hole, but leaves another hole behind in the location it just departed. So a "hole" moving in one direction is entirely equivalent to an electron moving in the opposite direction, is it not?
If so, why does this term have any usefulness, if, instead of saying "the hole moved from point A to point B" you could just as easily say "the electron moved from point B to point A"?
Help me understand why much ado is made about holes.
A hole moving in one direction is not the same as an electron moving in another direction. A hole moves in the valence band while the electrons move in the conduction band. An undoped semiconductor (or any insulator for that matter) has a valence band entirely full of electrons. When you replace a silicon atom with the boron atom, there is now an empty space in the valence band, which we call a hole. Pretend electrons are "." and holes are "o" The valence band will look something like this: ...............o............
In order for the hole to move from the middle to the left, 15 different electrons need to interchange places. One hole's movement cannot be modeled as one electron's movement.
Now in an n-type semiconductor, i.e., when a silicon atom has been replaced with phosphorous or some other group V element, there's an extra valence electron. Since the phosphorous has 5 electrons, it can form all 4 bonds with the other silicon atoms, and will still have an electron left over. The extra electron will be forced into the conduction band. It will look something like this:
oooooooooooooooooooo.oooooooooooooooooooo
(You can replace all the holes with empty space since they're the same thing.)
In order for the electron to move to the left, it can simply move across without any interference.
That's why we differentiate between holes and electrons. As you can see, the electrons will have an easier time through the semiconductor than the holes. Therefore, the electrons have higher mobilities than the holes. Essentially, electrons move through a sea of holes, while holes move through a sea of electrons. But since holes are not real particles, the two cannot be modeled in the same manner.
Thanks, now I don't have to RTFA. I was wondering why pure conductivity improvements are good for gates. Semiconductors are used for a reason.:-)
The increased mobility has little to do with gates. In fact, you want gates (in MOSFETs) to be as resistive as possible, but still not attenuate the electric field that results from the gate voltage, hence the use of Halfnium dioixde instead of silicon dioxide (you can make it thicker, (and thus more resistive) while still having a strong enough field.)
Mobility results from the equation v=(mu)E, where mu is the mobility and v is the velocity of an charge carrier (electron or hole) The reason we use semiconductors is that we can easily control the number of electrons or holes. But by increasing the speed of electrons, we can allow them to switch faster since they will be able to cross the channel more quickly. That's why smaller transistors can switch more quickly, the channel length is shorter so it takes less time for carriers to traverse them.
I'm not sure why it's considered so amazing to discover that graphene has a good electron mobility. Since, the entire structure consists of delocalized pi orbitals, you would expect electrons to easily travel through graphene. I'm not sure how graphene would be doped either. I suppose you could use boron and phosphorous like in silicon, but it remains to see if they will still bond appropriately. Ah well, there's a reason, they're professors and I'm a student.
The editors missed the most important fact. This is the enzyme which is actually inhibited by DiChloroAcetic Acid which was recently reported as the Wonder Drug by other groups of scientists. DCA inhibits pyruvate kinases, not just the M2 variety discovered and reported in the Nature article. That's why its side effects are so problematic. After all, normal cells do undergo glycolysis (the Krebs cycle, i.e., aerobic respiration, cannot continue without the products of glycolysis), it's just not as large a fraction of their energy source as tumors. The activity of DCA is simply based upon the Warburg effect, not on the inhibition of this specific variety of pyruvate kinase.
While this discovery is of great importance, we still need to find an inhibitor for this enzyme that will not also inhibit normal pyruvate kinases.
BTW, if anyone is interested in reading more about the discovery, Harvard Medical School has a more detailed press release and the two related articles in Nature can be found here (protein structure) and here (relationship to cancer). We haven't gotten to AZT yet, but this is a pretty large step towards finding a sort of "magic bullet" for tumors. At the very least, it's a common weakness most cancerous cells share.
How the hell is any of this interesting or insightful. It's a troll/flamebait. Nothing he said isn't obvious. Everyone knows that these top 10 lists are highly unlikely to actually be the top 10 lists of what will happen in the future. It's a list of what the editors of TR find interesting.
Modeling Surprise
All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.
And how is moving the goal post crap. Knowing that people are going to be more surprised by a hurricane in Oklahoma than in Kansas is useful for insurance companies. No prediction will ever be 100% accurate. I don't think anyone is claiming that.
Probabilistic Chips
This is not revolutionary or even interesting, as we teeter on the brink of optical computing.
Did you even RTFA? The article is talking about having chips run correctly a given percentage of the time. The probability inherent in optical computing (which we almost definitely do not teeter on the brink of) has more to do with quantum mechanics than with design tradeoffs.
NanoRadio
Great. Now head lice can listen to Coldplay. I'm so happy I could just plotz.
Wireless Power
Great. Plug in the cellphone, go to bed and the thing will zap bugs all night. And your cat.
Atomic Magnetometers
Fine - piss all this money into that, but defund free clinics, let people die from treatable diseases, etc. jusst because they're uninsured. Frankly, I could do with a little more focus on basic preventive health and health maintenance work, and a little less medical techno heroics. the tech stuff is easy because you don't have to care. dealing with some pregnant 14 year old from the ghetto, now that takes some attention...
If the above three aren't flamebait, I don't know what is. Small radios have uses other than for listening to music, such as smaller cellphones, and maybe even those magical tiny earpieces you always see in spy movies. And by the parent's standards, his poor cat is getting zapped every second by radio waves. Last time I checked, radio waves were nonionizing radiation. Besides, I don't think anyone plans on distributing power throughout an entire house this way. And as for the supposedly misguided "medical-techno heorics", you can just take care of that pregnant 14 year old without an ultrasond. Have fun!
Offline Web Applications
Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop.
It's also a plausible way to write crossplatform applications. Admittedly, I also think this one is rather silly.
Graphene Transistors
But will it make my porn look better?
Actually it could. Faster trasnsistors==Faster computer chips==more prevalent use of better, more computationally intensive video codecs==better porn (unless you were implying production quality, but sorry, can't help you much there). But in case you forgot, there are more uses for faster computers than porn. Changing the material that transistors have been made out of would be revolutionary. After all, we've had silicon devices nearly since the invention of the transistor itself and most definitely since the invention of the IC.
Connectomics
Wanna get rid of autism? Don't let a kid watch TV or use a video game until he's 10. That would clear up a good 20% of the autism AND ADHD cases would disappear. The rest of the autistics? They're tards. It's why we invented factories and WalMart. They need to work somewhere.
I'm not a biologist, but it's painfully obvious why so much reporting is done about biology.
Specifically, one element of biology. Evolution. I don't really think this is the case. The people who don't believe in evolution are unlikely to be reading science articles in their local newspaper to begin with. Besides, controversy about evolution usually isn't covered as part of scientific journalism. I still think that it has more to do with the fact that findings in biology are far easier to sensationalize because they have more to do with us. Whether its gay monkeys==gay people or "A new study shows that large does of vitamin L makes toucans thinner"=>people should eat vitamin L supplements, it's much easier to make biology sensational.
Nearly every journalist is biased in some way or another. While journalists may not necessarily inject the bias directly into their story like the example given in the article, the very choice of topic may be indicative of bias. Take for example the Reuters science articles on Yahoo! News. Nearly all the articles consist of biology stories or NASA/space related stories. In fact, when was the last time you read a news story in mainstream media on physics or chemistry? It was probably about the LHC or the "Exceptionally Simple Theory". This might be because it is harder to put the same spin on these types of stories. In fact, Garret Lisi's theory is so well known because he's been cast as a brilliant young surfer dude railing against the establishment. (Admittedly, the guy is no where as pig headed and arrogant as the biologist quoted in the article). Even Slashdot seems to be home to plenty of anti-establishment "scientific thinkers" who attempt to claim that nearly every other scientist has got it wrong and dark matter was simply invented to fit into an existing theory*, or our calculations of the age of the universe are complete BS. While I don't claim that the established theories are always right, they are considered to be "established" for a reason: they have a good deal of evidence in their favor.
To get back to my original point however, I would argue that this sort of selective reporting shapes the public view of science negatively. If you only hear about how scientists are wrong, then you might never even believe that they are right. Perhaps of more direct impact to scientists, the fact that the prevalence of this sort of scientific reporting seems to favor biology, can shift the spending of public money. After all, it seems like biologists are making breakthroughs every day and overturning established and outdated ways of thinking while physicists build expensive machines (even condensed matter physics research is expensive) and twiddle their thumbs. There's no excitement in a story that says "BaBar confirms that CP-violation in B-mesons fits within the parameters of the Standard Model" or "Researchers at (insert university/national lab of your choice) discover a method of sub-wavelength optical transmission". But without stories like that, the public sees almost nothing getting done in physical sciences.
Before a bunch of biologists start to flame me, I'd like to note that I don't think that biology is meaningless, or that biologists are pretentious pricks. It's just that journalists seems to draw an excessively large amounts of attention to biology, at the expense of other fields, almost always through no fault of the scientists.
*Dark matter does in fact have plenty of evidence for it. See the earlier Slashdot story of galaxies that don't have dark matter and gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster. Dark Energy, however, may in fact be a purely theoretical construct.
No, space is flat to within 2% (on cosmological scales, according to WMAP Year 5). Spacetime is curved, as per general relativity. I'm afraid that you have a serious misunderstanding of general relativity. Spacetime is indeed flat as a whole (besides your separation of space and time is rather nonsensical). It can be curved by mass-energy, but in the absence of ant external influence it is flat. That's why light travels in a straight line in the absence of gravitational forces. Spacetime is flat, therefore, a straight line along spacetime appears flat to us. Only in the presence of gravitational forces does the line appear to curve, since it is in fact traveling in a straight line along curved spacetime. To take the sheet of rubber analogy. Spacetime can be curved by a marble on the sheet, but the sheet by itself would be flat, as opposed to other geometries, in which the rubber might form a saddle other weird shapes.
Meet Archimedes http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/Archimedes/calculus.htm Sure Archimedes used integral calculus, just like many other Greek mathematicians. Other mathematicians had used differential calculus as well. But as far as we know, Newton and Leibniz were the first to formulate and prove the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, the basic relationship between differential and integral calculus.
Seriously though, does anyone expect Nvidia to say, "Yes, we really do think that our products will all be obsolete and outdated in a few years. Thank you for asking." I personally have no idea as to whether or not ray tracing is the future of games, but I really don't think that Nvidia is the right person to ask either, (just as Intel isn't).
How do you overstate the certainty of dark matter? Last I read, the only serious alternatives were that there's more interstellar dust than we thought (improbable considering the observations of the bending of light), modifications to the theory of gravity (few supporters, unlikely, especially with said observations), and string theory. I think kdawson meant that they were overstating the certainty of this theory, not the existence of dark matter in general. To be honest, I'm not sure why there are so many people (at least on/.) who want to relegate dark matter the the mathematical physics bin along with string theory. There's plenty of evidence for it. We've even observed gravitational lensing from dark matter. Dark energy on the other hand, may be something of a luminiferous aether.
But the ALS is more useful. I'm not a Stanford person, so I agree with the tree comment. But synchrotron radiation was first put to use at SLAC. The ALS would not exist were it not for the initial work done at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab. (which still exists and is used in scientific work, just like the ALS) Besides if you read the summary you would know that the LCLS is essentially a outrageously fast (femtosecond pulses) x-ray laster that's billions of times brighter than the ALS.
Like many people on Slashdot it seems, I think this law is rather pointless, but not necessarily for the same reasons. If you RTFA, anthropogenic global warming skeptics, then you would know that the bill does not mandate that any specifics of climate change be taught, i.e., no one is being told to teach that CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Rather it simply requires that climate change be taught as part of the California science curriculum. It's up to the state education board to determine specific standards as to what is being taught in specific grades.
I would think that even the skeptics (at least on Slashdot) would agree that the earth is getting warmer. Just teaching this in schools doesn't seem to be controversial in the slightest. But it seems rather silly to mandate this in a piece of legislation. It would be like mandating that algebra and geometry be taught to high school students. Any decent earth science curriculum (the focus of 6th grade science education in California) would already have this as part of its standards. Legislation is overkill.
This is one of the factors limiting the microelectronics industry, since they use photolithography, the minimum-feature size is limited by the wavelength of light being used. This is why they are interested in electron-beam, and x-ray lithography.
Sorry to nitpick, but while what you are saying is true, (i.e., wavelength of light limits feature size), practically no one wants to actually use e-beam or real x-ray lithography, mainly because the light sources are tremendously expensive. (The only viable source for real x-ray lithography i.e.,
To address the article though, yes, the 12.8 billion year figure is pulled out of someone's ass. Granted, there was some math involved, but there is far too little data to calculate the actual age of the earth, never mind anything else. Those with a chip on their shoulder will of course take offense to the blanket disbelief of the "scientific consensus".
Realists know that betting against the current science when it regards dates is about as safe as a bet as you can make. It is 100% guaranteed to be found incorrect, probably within 50 years. Date setters just want attention. If they were intellectually honest, they wouldn't bother.
All right here's your person with a chip on his shoulder. Regardless as whether or not you take the calculations behind the age of the universe to be valid, to claim that date-setting is intellectually dishonest is rather stupid. Let's say that 100 years ago, I came up with a model of the universe that resulted in the age of the universe being 300 million years old. Later when evidence is found indicating that there exist objects that are 1 billion years old, my model will clearly be proven to be wrong. If I had never been "intellectually dishonest" by calculating the age of the universe, my model may have never been proven wrong.
These date-setters are basing their ideas on the well-accepted theories that allow much of the modern world to function as it does (i.e., relativity). I'm not claiming that holes will never be found in them. But to claim that no work should be done based on these models would be like saying that Bohr should have never published his model for the atom because it only worked for atoms with one electron.
Err, I disagree with some bits of it...
1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application.
IIRC there's currently a shedload of funding (albeit belated) into the basics of eco-friendly energy solutions... from major players in the energy industry.
You kid, right? Is eco-friendly energy really your idea of fundamental research? By its very nature, fundamental research does not have any foreseeable practical application. Green energy most definitely does.
2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped.
Bell Labs, XEROX (and PARC), and for more recent and tech-relevant examples - IBM, Novell, Sun (which hasn't seen a dime of profit off of OOo). Are you sure about that being true? (especially in light of the fact that damned near anything can be monetized nowadays).
I'll give you Bell Labs and PARC, but you'll note that they're dead. Of all the example that you gave, only IBM still exists and conducts research that doesn't have an immediate profit motivation. Novell and Sun are horrible examples. You call OOo research? It's a valuable contribution to the open source community, but I think you're seriously misguided as to what scientific research consists of. If you want actual software research, you have to go to MS (yes they're evil, just like IBM used to be, but having a guaranteed profit stream from a monopolized product allows you to conduct seemingly useless research) or Google.
"1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application."
So you want a federal government to fund science that has no application for the masses? Sounds like something that benefits the few rather than the many, which is better done in the private sector. I don't want my tax dollars at work for something that benefits almost no one. That's a great way to completely misinterpret what he was saying. Science may not always have a benefit for everyone, but it's the stuff that no one has any clue about that might end up having the greatest benefit to society. To use the oft-quoted example of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger's research into quantum mechanics. What began as a way to give an explanation for the spectral lines for hydrogen eventually led to the computer you use today. A modern day equivalent to their research is the particle physics research that is carried out in places like the LHC or Fermilab. I don't know (nor does anyone else) what practical applications will result from this research (discounting the work put into making particle accelerators that resulted in synchrotron radiation and the like), could lead to the next scientific revolution.
"2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped. This is already happening in the now-privatized University R&D and it happened long, long ago in business."
Right down the road from me the University of Illinois is building a new $300,000,000 supercomputer funded by private donations, including my own. If the University is good enough, it will have the funding. Free market determines this. All right, we'll see how the University of Illinois' funding situation goes when it doesn't have any federal funding. (BTW, you realize that the University of Illinois is a *public* university!). Moreover, if you're going to tell me that the supercomputer there even compares to machines like BlueGene/L, etc, then you're simply lying. The free market will only give you what it deems to be the most profitable. Science, especially research into basic physical sciences, should not be funded based on profitability, simply because it is impossible to predict how useful the research will be.
"3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style."
So you want to compare the number of scientific discoveries and new useful products developed by foreign governments compared to private companies within the United States? Are you crazy? To claim that government funded research has given us nothing is idiocy. I'm not arguing that private R&D doesn't have its place, but to say that government funded research is useless is rather stupid as well.
"4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation."
Corporate R&D is buying ideas, not stealing. While our patent system needs work, it does have a purpose. I'll agree with you there, I never would say that corporate R&D doesn't have its place. But scientific research should not be solely motivated by profit.
What else are DOE machines used for other than research? Isn't this like saying "The Department of Transportation awards 100 million highway miles to travelers" or "NASA awards 100 shuttle flights to astronauts"?
I'm pretty sure that the point is that they have 265 million processor years to hand out, rather than the fact that they were handed out. Until Earth Simulator came online in Japan a several years ago, the state of supercomputing was languishing in the US, (at least for scientific research purposes, for all we know, the NSA has several petaflops of computing capacity.)
Unfortunately, it seems like politicians have gone a bit overboard in devoting resources to supercomputing, since according to this article, funding for various research labs and organizations, (Fermilab, ITER, etc.) were cut, while supercomputing got MORE money than requested. Hopefully, they'll come to their senses next year.
1) You could attach probes to passing by roids and then detach when they're about to pull back towards the sun. Saves on fuel and gets the probe further out our system. You do realize that this will take *more* energy than simply placing your spacecraft in the same orbit as whatever asteroid you want to hitch a ride on, don't you? Once you've matched velocity and orbital position with your asteroid, (which you would need to do in order to land on asteroid without getting destroyed), your spacecraft will follow the same exact path as the asteroid would. You would actually save energy if you didn't land on the asteroid, because you wouldn't have to escape the asteroid's gravity well when you wanted to get off the rock.
He hates Dr. Bill Wattenburg (and other moderates) with such a vengeance that he has censored Wattenburg's last name in the chatroom.
Karel is most definitely a wacko liberal (I have never heard Taliaferro), but calling Wattenburg a moderate is not exactly accurate either.
This is a guy who has called most environmental groups frauds for asking for higher CAFE standards, because "heavy cars are safer." He conveniently discounts the fact that if everyone had lighter cars, it wouldn't be a problem.
And he has the classic extremist failure, just like Karel, of pretending to know everything. I realize that the guy is smart at some things, but at other times he is so ignorant, especially of biology. He has said that acid rain will not hurt trees, and numerous other fallacies.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never heard of that before, (specifically the second one at SLAC, would it use electron beams from the existing linac or a new one?). The only thing I've heard of is that there are talks of possibly turning PEP-II into a extremely low emittance synchrotron radiation source,a la PETRA, since there's basically not going to be any more accelerator based particle physics at SLAC. Are there really questions as to whether the LCLS will work (i.e., meet its stated design parameters), or do they center more around its actual utility?
It's true that accelerator science has been driven by HEP, but most accelerator physicists (like me) will admit that their market is changing, and our future customers will be biologists and chemists, not physicists. I hope so, because it's a really amazing field, but I don't see much of a demand for advances in the field from chemistry/biology/applied physicists. As far as I can tell there isn't much of a point to building synchrotrons of an energy higher than 9-10 GeV. Even greater brightness isn't of much use anymore, at least in X-ray crystallography (according to the people I have talked to, IANAC(rystallographer)). The only thing that can really seems to be of use now is lowering emittance, which is not as monumental of a technical challenge as perfecting higher frequency klystrons, etc.I've never heard the story about XFEL being hampered by length. Do you mean the German one, or were you referring to LCLS?
I was referring to the German one. I heard a story at SLAC from a presenter from DESY in which he said that there were a bunch of bureaucratic hassles with the linac for the XFEL since it extended into another county. (He wasn't actually working on the project though, and didn't say that it ended up causing any specific problems.) I think the main issue is the sheer cost of building something like that, according to the XFEL's website, construction costs 968 million Euros. That's only construction costs. At current (Google) exchange rates, that's about $1.5 billion and I don't think there are many countries willing to shell out that kind of money. On the other hand, the newest light source under design, NSLS-II, will cost a total of about $750-900 million (there are conflicting reports) and that's including the little R & D they need to do. For a more current example, DIAMOND, the new UK synchrotron, cost only 260 million pounds plus 160 million pounds for additional beamlines for a total 835 million dollars. New light sources such as 4GLS in Britain, an ERL and FEL combination of sorts, have been cancelled. I really don't think they are going to be that many new XFELs. At the very least I doublt they will become anywhere as common as synchrotron radiation sources, of which there at least 4 in the US with large user groups (APS, ALS, SSRL, NSLS).
True, the LCLS and XFEL are going to be awesome, but I don't know how well accelerator physics will do. Admittedly, more countries seem into making their own synchrotron light facilities. But the LCLS wouldn't have been built if it weren't for the linac lying around that had been built ~40 years ago . And despite their uses in light sources, accelerator physics still seems to be greatly driven by HEP, not photon science. There isn't going to be a rush to build XFELs everywhere, since two mile long linacs take up a lot of space. I've even heard that the XFEL was slightly hampered because the end of the tunnel extends into another county.
That's not really true, (at least for the left of infrared telescopes). There are a relatively small set of frequencies absorbed by water and/or reflected by the ionosphere. But a good deal of stuff is let through. Otherwise radio astronomy would be pretty useless. And last time I checked astronomers weren't complaining about their giant arrays of dish antennas being entirely useless.
First of all, holes are not the result of net positive charges in an atom. In silicon, you can create holes by replacing a silicon atom in the crystal lattice with a boron atom. Silicon has 4 valence electrons, but boron only has 3. Therefore, the silicon atom that is replaced by the boron could form 4 bonds with neighboring silicon atoms. The boron can only form 3. The remaining empty space is what we call a hole. Note that nothing is electrically charged.
An electron can move and fill a hole, but leaves another hole behind in the location it just departed. So a "hole" moving in one direction is entirely equivalent to an electron moving in the opposite direction, is it not?If so, why does this term have any usefulness, if, instead of saying "the hole moved from point A to point B" you could just as easily say "the electron moved from point B to point A"?
Help me understand why much ado is made about holes.
A hole moving in one direction is not the same as an electron moving in another direction. A hole moves in the valence band while the electrons move in the conduction band. An undoped semiconductor (or any insulator for that matter) has a valence band entirely full of electrons. When you replace a silicon atom with the boron atom, there is now an empty space in the valence band, which we call a hole. Pretend electrons are "." and holes are "o" The valence band will look something like this:
...............o............
In order for the hole to move from the middle to the left, 15 different electrons need to interchange places. One hole's movement cannot be modeled as one electron's movement.
Now in an n-type semiconductor, i.e., when a silicon atom has been replaced with phosphorous or some other group V element, there's an extra valence electron. Since the phosphorous has 5 electrons, it can form all 4 bonds with the other silicon atoms, and will still have an electron left over. The extra electron will be forced into the conduction band. It will look something like this:
oooooooooooooooooooo.oooooooooooooooooooo
(You can replace all the holes with empty space since they're the same thing.) In order for the electron to move to the left, it can simply move across without any interference.
That's why we differentiate between holes and electrons. As you can see, the electrons will have an easier time through the semiconductor than the holes. Therefore, the electrons have higher mobilities than the holes. Essentially, electrons move through a sea of holes, while holes move through a sea of electrons. But since holes are not real particles, the two cannot be modeled in the same manner.
The increased mobility has little to do with gates. In fact, you want gates (in MOSFETs) to be as resistive as possible, but still not attenuate the electric field that results from the gate voltage, hence the use of Halfnium dioixde instead of silicon dioxide (you can make it thicker, (and thus more resistive) while still having a strong enough field.)
Mobility results from the equation v=(mu)E, where mu is the mobility and v is the velocity of an charge carrier (electron or hole) The reason we use semiconductors is that we can easily control the number of electrons or holes. But by increasing the speed of electrons, we can allow them to switch faster since they will be able to cross the channel more quickly. That's why smaller transistors can switch more quickly, the channel length is shorter so it takes less time for carriers to traverse them.
I'm not sure why it's considered so amazing to discover that graphene has a good electron mobility. Since, the entire structure consists of delocalized pi orbitals, you would expect electrons to easily travel through graphene. I'm not sure how graphene would be doped either. I suppose you could use boron and phosphorous like in silicon, but it remains to see if they will still bond appropriately. Ah well, there's a reason, they're professors and I'm a student.
While this discovery is of great importance, we still need to find an inhibitor for this enzyme that will not also inhibit normal pyruvate kinases. BTW, if anyone is interested in reading more about the discovery, Harvard Medical School has a more detailed press release and the two related articles in Nature can be found here (protein structure) and here (relationship to cancer). We haven't gotten to AZT yet, but this is a pretty large step towards finding a sort of "magic bullet" for tumors. At the very least, it's a common weakness most cancerous cells share.
Modeling Surprise
All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.
And how is moving the goal post crap. Knowing that people are going to be more surprised by a hurricane in Oklahoma than in Kansas is useful for insurance companies. No prediction will ever be 100% accurate. I don't think anyone is claiming that.
Probabilistic Chips
This is not revolutionary or even interesting, as we teeter on the brink of optical computing.
Did you even RTFA? The article is talking about having chips run correctly a given percentage of the time. The probability inherent in optical computing (which we almost definitely do not teeter on the brink of) has more to do with quantum mechanics than with design tradeoffs.
NanoRadio
Great. Now head lice can listen to Coldplay. I'm so happy I could just plotz.
Wireless Power
Great. Plug in the cellphone, go to bed and the thing will zap bugs all night. And your cat.
Atomic Magnetometers
Fine - piss all this money into that, but defund free clinics, let people die from treatable diseases, etc. jusst because they're uninsured. Frankly, I could do with a little more focus on basic preventive health and health maintenance work, and a little less medical techno heroics. the tech stuff is easy because you don't have to care. dealing with some pregnant 14 year old from the ghetto, now that takes some attention...
If the above three aren't flamebait, I don't know what is. Small radios have uses other than for listening to music, such as smaller cellphones, and maybe even those magical tiny earpieces you always see in spy movies. And by the parent's standards, his poor cat is getting zapped every second by radio waves. Last time I checked, radio waves were nonionizing radiation. Besides, I don't think anyone plans on distributing power throughout an entire house this way. And as for the supposedly misguided "medical-techno heorics", you can just take care of that pregnant 14 year old without an ultrasond. Have fun!
Offline Web Applications
Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop.
It's also a plausible way to write crossplatform applications. Admittedly, I also think this one is rather silly.
Graphene Transistors
But will it make my porn look better?
Actually it could. Faster trasnsistors==Faster computer chips==more prevalent use of better, more computationally intensive video codecs==better porn (unless you were implying production quality, but sorry, can't help you much there). But in case you forgot, there are more uses for faster computers than porn. Changing the material that transistors have been made out of would be revolutionary. After all, we've had silicon devices nearly since the invention of the transistor itself and most definitely since the invention of the IC.
Connectomics Wanna get rid of autism? Don't let a kid watch TV or use a video game until he's 10. That would clear up a good 20% of the autism AND ADHD cases would disappear. The rest of the autistics? They're tards. It's why we invented factories and WalMart. They need to work somewhere.
I'm sorry, but do you even
Specifically, one element of biology. Evolution. I don't really think this is the case. The people who don't believe in evolution are unlikely to be reading science articles in their local newspaper to begin with. Besides, controversy about evolution usually isn't covered as part of scientific journalism. I still think that it has more to do with the fact that findings in biology are far easier to sensationalize because they have more to do with us. Whether its gay monkeys==gay people or "A new study shows that large does of vitamin L makes toucans thinner"=>people should eat vitamin L supplements, it's much easier to make biology sensational.
Nearly every journalist is biased in some way or another. While journalists may not necessarily inject the bias directly into their story like the example given in the article, the very choice of topic may be indicative of bias. Take for example the Reuters science articles on Yahoo! News. Nearly all the articles consist of biology stories or NASA/space related stories. In fact, when was the last time you read a news story in mainstream media on physics or chemistry? It was probably about the LHC or the "Exceptionally Simple Theory". This might be because it is harder to put the same spin on these types of stories. In fact, Garret Lisi's theory is so well known because he's been cast as a brilliant young surfer dude railing against the establishment. (Admittedly, the guy is no where as pig headed and arrogant as the biologist quoted in the article). Even Slashdot seems to be home to plenty of anti-establishment "scientific thinkers" who attempt to claim that nearly every other scientist has got it wrong and dark matter was simply invented to fit into an existing theory*, or our calculations of the age of the universe are complete BS. While I don't claim that the established theories are always right, they are considered to be "established" for a reason: they have a good deal of evidence in their favor.
To get back to my original point however, I would argue that this sort of selective reporting shapes the public view of science negatively. If you only hear about how scientists are wrong, then you might never even believe that they are right. Perhaps of more direct impact to scientists, the fact that the prevalence of this sort of scientific reporting seems to favor biology, can shift the spending of public money. After all, it seems like biologists are making breakthroughs every day and overturning established and outdated ways of thinking while physicists build expensive machines (even condensed matter physics research is expensive) and twiddle their thumbs. There's no excitement in a story that says "BaBar confirms that CP-violation in B-mesons fits within the parameters of the Standard Model" or "Researchers at (insert university/national lab of your choice) discover a method of sub-wavelength optical transmission". But without stories like that, the public sees almost nothing getting done in physical sciences.
Before a bunch of biologists start to flame me, I'd like to note that I don't think that biology is meaningless, or that biologists are pretentious pricks. It's just that journalists seems to draw an excessively large amounts of attention to biology, at the expense of other fields, almost always through no fault of the scientists.
*Dark matter does in fact have plenty of evidence for it. See the earlier Slashdot story of galaxies that don't have dark matter and gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster. Dark Energy, however, may in fact be a purely theoretical construct.
No, space is flat to within 2% (on cosmological scales, according to WMAP Year 5). Spacetime is curved, as per general relativity. I'm afraid that you have a serious misunderstanding of general relativity. Spacetime is indeed flat as a whole (besides your separation of space and time is rather nonsensical). It can be curved by mass-energy, but in the absence of ant external influence it is flat. That's why light travels in a straight line in the absence of gravitational forces. Spacetime is flat, therefore, a straight line along spacetime appears flat to us. Only in the presence of gravitational forces does the line appear to curve, since it is in fact traveling in a straight line along curved spacetime. To take the sheet of rubber analogy. Spacetime can be curved by a marble on the sheet, but the sheet by itself would be flat, as opposed to other geometries, in which the rubber might form a saddle other weird shapes.
Seriously though, does anyone expect Nvidia to say, "Yes, we really do think that our products will all be obsolete and outdated in a few years. Thank you for asking." I personally have no idea as to whether or not ray tracing is the future of games, but I really don't think that Nvidia is the right person to ask either, (just as Intel isn't).
I'm not a Stanford person, so I agree with the tree comment. But synchrotron radiation was first put to use at SLAC. The ALS would not exist were it not for the initial work done at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab. (which still exists and is used in scientific work, just like the ALS) Besides if you read the summary you would know that the LCLS is essentially a outrageously fast (femtosecond pulses) x-ray laster that's billions of times brighter than the ALS.
Like many people on Slashdot it seems, I think this law is rather pointless, but not necessarily for the same reasons. If you RTFA, anthropogenic global warming skeptics, then you would know that the bill does not mandate that any specifics of climate change be taught, i.e., no one is being told to teach that CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Rather it simply requires that climate change be taught as part of the California science curriculum. It's up to the state education board to determine specific standards as to what is being taught in specific grades.
I would think that even the skeptics (at least on Slashdot) would agree that the earth is getting warmer. Just teaching this in schools doesn't seem to be controversial in the slightest. But it seems rather silly to mandate this in a piece of legislation. It would be like mandating that algebra and geometry be taught to high school students. Any decent earth science curriculum (the focus of 6th grade science education in California) would already have this as part of its standards. Legislation is overkill.
Sorry to nitpick, but while what you are saying is true, (i.e., wavelength of light limits feature size), practically no one wants to actually use e-beam or real x-ray lithography, mainly because the light sources are tremendously expensive. (The only viable source for real x-ray lithography i.e.,
Realists know that betting against the current science when it regards dates is about as safe as a bet as you can make. It is 100% guaranteed to be found incorrect, probably within 50 years. Date setters just want attention. If they were intellectually honest, they wouldn't bother.
All right here's your person with a chip on his shoulder. Regardless as whether or not you take the calculations behind the age of the universe to be valid, to claim that date-setting is intellectually dishonest is rather stupid. Let's say that 100 years ago, I came up with a model of the universe that resulted in the age of the universe being 300 million years old. Later when evidence is found indicating that there exist objects that are 1 billion years old, my model will clearly be proven to be wrong. If I had never been "intellectually dishonest" by calculating the age of the universe, my model may have never been proven wrong.
These date-setters are basing their ideas on the well-accepted theories that allow much of the modern world to function as it does (i.e., relativity). I'm not claiming that holes will never be found in them. But to claim that no work should be done based on these models would be like saying that Bohr should have never published his model for the atom because it only worked for atoms with one electron.
IIRC there's currently a shedload of funding (albeit belated) into the basics of eco-friendly energy solutions... from major players in the energy industry.
You kid, right? Is eco-friendly energy really your idea of fundamental research? By its very nature, fundamental research does not have any foreseeable practical application. Green energy most definitely does. 2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped.Bell Labs, XEROX (and PARC), and for more recent and tech-relevant examples - IBM, Novell, Sun (which hasn't seen a dime of profit off of OOo). Are you sure about that being true? (especially in light of the fact that damned near anything can be monetized nowadays).
I'll give you Bell Labs and PARC, but you'll note that they're dead. Of all the example that you gave, only IBM still exists and conducts research that doesn't have an immediate profit motivation. Novell and Sun are horrible examples. You call OOo research? It's a valuable contribution to the open source community, but I think you're seriously misguided as to what scientific research consists of. If you want actual software research, you have to go to MS (yes they're evil, just like IBM used to be, but having a guaranteed profit stream from a monopolized product allows you to conduct seemingly useless research) or Google.So you want a federal government to fund science that has no application for the masses? Sounds like something that benefits the few rather than the many, which is better done in the private sector. I don't want my tax dollars at work for something that benefits almost no one. That's a great way to completely misinterpret what he was saying. Science may not always have a benefit for everyone, but it's the stuff that no one has any clue about that might end up having the greatest benefit to society. To use the oft-quoted example of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger's research into quantum mechanics. What began as a way to give an explanation for the spectral lines for hydrogen eventually led to the computer you use today. A modern day equivalent to their research is the particle physics research that is carried out in places like the LHC or Fermilab. I don't know (nor does anyone else) what practical applications will result from this research (discounting the work put into making particle accelerators that resulted in synchrotron radiation and the like), could lead to the next scientific revolution. "2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped. This is already happening in the now-privatized University R&D and it happened long, long ago in business."
Right down the road from me the University of Illinois is building a new $300,000,000 supercomputer funded by private donations, including my own. If the University is good enough, it will have the funding. Free market determines this. All right, we'll see how the University of Illinois' funding situation goes when it doesn't have any federal funding. (BTW, you realize that the University of Illinois is a *public* university!). Moreover, if you're going to tell me that the supercomputer there even compares to machines like BlueGene/L, etc, then you're simply lying. The free market will only give you what it deems to be the most profitable. Science, especially research into basic physical sciences, should not be funded based on profitability, simply because it is impossible to predict how useful the research will be. "3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style."
So you want to compare the number of scientific discoveries and new useful products developed by foreign governments compared to private companies within the United States? Are you crazy? To claim that government funded research has given us nothing is idiocy. I'm not arguing that private R&D doesn't have its place, but to say that government funded research is useless is rather stupid as well. "4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation."
Corporate R&D is buying ideas, not stealing. While our patent system needs work, it does have a purpose. I'll agree with you there, I never would say that corporate R&D doesn't have its place. But scientific research should not be solely motivated by profit.
I'm pretty sure that the point is that they have 265 million processor years to hand out, rather than the fact that they were handed out. Until Earth Simulator came online in Japan a several years ago, the state of supercomputing was languishing in the US, (at least for scientific research purposes, for all we know, the NSA has several petaflops of computing capacity.)
Unfortunately, it seems like politicians have gone a bit overboard in devoting resources to supercomputing, since according to this article, funding for various research labs and organizations, (Fermilab, ITER, etc.) were cut, while supercomputing got MORE money than requested. Hopefully, they'll come to their senses next year.
You do realize that this will take *more* energy than simply placing your spacecraft in the same orbit as whatever asteroid you want to hitch a ride on, don't you? Once you've matched velocity and orbital position with your asteroid, (which you would need to do in order to land on asteroid without getting destroyed), your spacecraft will follow the same exact path as the asteroid would. You would actually save energy if you didn't land on the asteroid, because you wouldn't have to escape the asteroid's gravity well when you wanted to get off the rock.
Karel is most definitely a wacko liberal (I have never heard Taliaferro), but calling Wattenburg a moderate is not exactly accurate either.
This is a guy who has called most environmental groups frauds for asking for higher CAFE standards, because "heavy cars are safer." He conveniently discounts the fact that if everyone had lighter cars, it wouldn't be a problem.
And he has the classic extremist failure, just like Karel, of pretending to know everything. I realize that the guy is smart at some things, but at other times he is so ignorant, especially of biology. He has said that acid rain will not hurt trees, and numerous other fallacies.