Given that he also forgot the name of someone he interviewed, and then lost the entire interview, I'd say it's about par for the course.
I want someone to follow up on that work that showed a single sheet of graphene almost perfectly traps helium (while still letting polar-as-shit water through!). A helium balloon that never leaks! It'd be like Mylar on steroids. Wrap your superconducting magnets in it, and you could practically solve the helium shortage overnight. Of course, that much graphene would probably cost more than the NMR or MRI, but whatever. Graphene!
Actually, it isn't. With a GDP of ~$15.02B, 1.06 times our GDP would be $15.9B. That's more than the national debt of $15.34B.
I knew about the first 4, but I had no idea GPS was sensitive enough to detect large-scale shock waves moving through the atmosphere. Nifty!
Someone I knew worked in an office building, and was luck enough to have an office with a very large, almost floor-to-ceiling window. Except that one fall, ladybugs began to swarm. Somehow, they found a way into the window, between the panes of glass, but couldn't find their way out. The window filled up with hundreds, if not thousands, of ladybugs. They started to invade the office as well. Then it began to rain, and water leaked in between the window panes as well, creating a sheet of dead, floating ladybugs. The custodial staff were totally incapable of stopping more ladybugs from coming in, much less getting those inside the window back out. It was just a complete mess.
That said, I do think they're adorable, and would love if more would hang out in my garden. Sadly not likely, since it's on the roof of a building in a city.
As terrible as this is for lase-faire sex lives everywhere, it happens to be rather decent news for me personally. One of the big reasons no one has made a vaccine against ghonorrhea yet is that no agency would fund it, because it was so easily treatable. (That's not to say it's an easy problem, it isn't, just that it was deemed not worth the expense.) Now, with the rise of resistant bugs, the NIH is suddenly interested in a vaccine. And oh look, I happen to work in a vaccine-design lab that focuses on various Neisseria species. Our grant application went in last week.
In some cases, it's not quite so disingenuous. The Missouri primary really is useless, as it doesn't even send any delegates; they are awarded solely on the basis of performance in the caucus to come later.
Notice that I used the key verb "introducing". As in, actively done by man. Narrowed down like that, there are rather fewer numbers of examples, and they almost always result in stark losses of biodiversity, which I'm using as an indicator of badness.
Introducing non-native species has failed almost every time in the past; surely we're due for a success now, right? Isn't that how probability works?
Seriously though, what would be wrong with just going back to the controlled burn scheme of the past? If it worked for 50k years, maybe you should give it a shot again on its own before trying wacky schemes with a centuries of failed history behind them?
And another article that gets the definition of "space" totally wrong. Space starts 100km, or 328,000 feet, above sea level. At 120,000 feet Baumgartner, like all those weather balloon passengers, would be barely 1/3 of the way there.
That's not to say that this isn't an awesome attempt. Just don't try to call it something it isn't.
In the Westerhaven society in Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes, your social status is determined by your "authority". A measure of the respect other people have for you, and the influence you have, it's tracked by an all-encompassing electronic network, and foes everything from determine who can see you, to what virtual conversations become real.
So are all of the brand new commenters shilling the heck out of Genspera's stock overexcited employees, pump-and-dumpers, or some strange phishing scheme? They're a little confusing, and don't exactly give anyone confidence in the company.
Incorrect. The value of the stock currently being released in the IPO is valued at $5-$8B, and expected to generate that much in revenue for the company. However, most of the stock is already owned, and so only ~6.7% of the total shares are going onto the market. 6.7% of the stock being worth $5 Billion would given a total value for the company of $75 Billion, or $100 Billion if it hits the high end of the estimates. That $200 Million number isn't Gawker's, it's a direct quote from the NYT. Or do you want to accuse them, and every other business mag that's written about the IPO, of fundamental ignorance about the sale?
The concept of pre-ordering a free ebook is a little strange, but sure, I'll bite.
I choose to believe that the size of those planets is to scale with their orbits, and thus the two large planets in the second row, 4th from the left, are in fact constantly bumping into each other.
Kepler hasn't "nearly doubled" the total number of known exoplanets. It's nearly doubled the number it has discovered. There are over 500 other known planets discovered by other, mostly ground based, telescopes. Bit of a difference there.
A few quibbles, Alastair. I'm pretty sure your line "The X-ray laser works just as conventional lasers do: by forcing electrons to move from higher energy levels to lower ones within atoms" is not correct with regards to the LCLS (although it would be correct for the neon capsule laser). Based on my hazy memories of undergrad physics, the LCLS sounds a lot more like a free electron laser. In that case, photons are generated not by electrons falling to lower energy orbitals in an atom, but by deflecting a "free" (i.e. not bound to a nucleus at all) electron within a magnetic field. The magnetic field causes the moving electron (or any charged particle) to change direction, and so to conserve momentum and energy, a photon in released. Make a sharp enough turn, and the energy required to do so means you're giving off very high energy photons. That's one of the reasons circular particle accelerators are getting larger and larger in diameter: any small and the turns would be so sharp they'd lose all their energy by spewing hard radiation everywhere.
I think some diode lasers use a third option, where an electron doesn't fall to a lower energy level within an atom, but to a low energy hole on the opposite side of the semiconductor. I could easily be wrong about that, though.
LCLS is. It sounds like the neon capsule functions more like a pumped laser.
I'll register my typical complaint, which is that this didn't even get close to space. These weather balloon ascents only get up to ~30km, roughly a third of the way to space. It's stratospheric sushi, not space sushi. It's a bit of a pedantic gripe, but one that practically every article on these flights gets wrong.
Of course, a referendum is almost certain to be filed by conservatives before the law goes into effect, meaning this is going to head to the voters by Nov, but at least it's progress.
(Everything I know, I learned from NPR. Blame them if I'm misunderstanding something.)
