Ditto IANA manufacturer type, but I do have first hand experience with a plastic thing starting to smell like cat pee.
It was in the year 2012, my red nylon spatula, having a red scraper part and a black handle part, which I'd owned for a few years, suddely turned my kitchen drawer into a stinky mess. Of course I thought it was food residue, but it quickly turned out to be eminating from specifically the red "active" bit of the spatula. I tried dishwashing it away, to no avail. I sent an email to the seller, but unfortunately my interest died out when the seller pointed out I should talk to the producer. Now I've forwarded the mail to the correct people, let's see if they have an explanation.

This article was my only clue at the time http://sandwalk.blogspot.no/2007/01/smell-of-cat-pee.html
Although (bio)chemical pathways are interesting, without a trained eye for structures and experience with plastics, I'm lost.

We have a Microsoft Sharepoint system at work where we log our project hours. Hitting Save now moves all hours to one later date, until everything is deleted at January 7th...

Unfortunately I have to do half an anniversary on both February 28 and March 1 to get the average right.

I voted water because we do produce energy from mainly hydropower in Norway. However, there is an energy market where my power distributor sells and buys, and I've opted for the "CO2 free" package, which guarantees that they only buy from renewable energy sources, which could be supporting a wind power company in Germany. At the moment this means that my supplier "buys energy" from hydropower (94.5%) and windpower (5.5%). The alternative "cheapest energy" package would give me only 24% of renewable sources and 59% of "unidentified" sources, which often means coal.

A viral video of a new game in the wipeout series made it to slashdot frontpage? I must be new here.

I'm not feeling very competent, but:

a) Soot particles aggregate, lowering their surface-to-volume ratio, shutting down the combustion, or
b) Soot particles escape the plasma, shutting down combustion, or
c) Electron flow from the gun interferes with the combustion reaction itself, which would be awesome

"The suspect is a newcomer adhering to group 31US0041. It took us 15 minutes to complete the DNA analysis, and another 30 minutes to locate the suspect, since they all look identical. Case closed."

It seems to me that the combination of a large external drive and online storage is easy and safe. The crashplan backup software lets you perform backup of a set of data to multiple destinations, including any connected drive/folder, online storage and sending to friends' computers. Thus you can be a couple of friends (3 should be more than enough) who team up to have 3 copies of each others' backup sets.

That way the backup is performed quickly to the external drive, while it trickles to the online repository and to your friends, depending on your broadband speed. Get some international friends and you're ridiculously secure from any disaster. I imagine crashplan soon will have "virtual friends" which are backup sites in the siberian tundra or something, why not?

Simon

Come on, any good salesperson in a shop, booth, kiosk would to the same:
"One mars bar please"
"There you go. By the way we've got a good offer on razors this week. Playboy mag here says the ladies like it clean nowadays. Although that coke ad says the opposite, that them girls like it ruffian style, it's refreshing."

I've tried an ipad and I thought it was awesome. I would love to have in the lab to make notes and look up information and later run to my colleagues down the research hall and show a video of something amazing that just happened, which we can discuss and giggle about. That tablet thing makes certain collaboration and sharing tasks more fluent than either emailing or physically shoving a laptop around.

If there is a tablet that can be docked in a comfortable keyboard and has the power (thin-client?) to do serious work, then I'm all in.

Right now, though, I have a nice laptop which is fairly portable and can run without any cables for a significant amount of time. Plus I have an iphone 4 that allows me to consume and share cool things rapidly and fluently. I still need something that replaces my current laptop, which is a very high step to reach.

I just thought it should be said. Even in a discussion about metric and imperial units, christmas and new year's, religions of various kinds; It's also okay to be gay. I'm not saying that imperial units are gay. That would be wrong. Like racism. I'm not saying that imperial units are discriminating anyone either. I'm just saying..that some times.. it's good to divide and multiply by ten. It's nice to be gay, and divide by ten, whereever you are in the world, what your history is, multiply a little, by factors of 10! It's cool. And it's okay.

To all who criticize the money spent on this research: Do you really think we ever can or should stop a question from being answered? Are not scientists in their position because at some point they were curious about the world and went about getting educated in skillfully pursuing answers? I think in this case a simple question was answered and presented decently with the first empirical data. Next, they can dig out a theoretical model that fit the observed data. If they struggle finding a good theoretical match, then things get interesting.

Question: Is resistance to antibiotics energy-unfavourable for bacteria? Meaning, if antibiotics are not abundantly present to guide bacterial evolution, will bacterial strains revert to a 'simpler structure' and become susceptible to antibiotics again?

I was scrolling down to see if anyone had suggested this before posting myself, and lo.. This all leads to a society that preserves the knowledge of a person by adapting an artificial intelligence to it and letting this artificial intelligence free to communicate in a network. I've read this somewhere I'm sure, maybe The Night's Dawn Trilogy? In this way, you are not only preserving the factual knowledge a person possesses, but that person's unique interpretation and creative constructs based on that knowledge. We would maybe need to mimic a neural network that is modeled closely to the person in question. The problem won't be to have the computing capacity to do this in some years, the problem will be how to read the neural network of a (recently deceased?) brain. Anyway, if we made an artificial intelligence that would post things to facebook and twitter, I think it would only turn out creepy because what we post on facebook/twitter is curated information or new media or brainfarts. Now the brainfarts we can do, but we can't create new media; Imagine a photo of your dead friend at a bar five days after he died. Nope, it doesn't work. another stone for you

I believe freedom of speech is good morale, even by objective scientific terms, because it reflects that each person on this planet are perfectly equal. If brought up with an ideal set of equal oppurtunities to food, education and the expression of their utility; be it building a park, harvesting oil, producing art, solving conflicts etc, any "clean slate" baby taken from any mother on this planet would have no less place in society than the next k+1 member. It is utopia, but an approachable one. Some nations are closer to it than others. Some nations "do it wrong" by muddling the right of the individual with mechanisms that allow the individual right to not create conditions conducive to the right of the individual, even while accepting to live in the same society. Maybe the world should have one anarchist geographical area, ratified by all the nations of the world, as Anarchia, where everyone not happy with having leaders, can go and live their lives in total freedom. We like to think that facebook is the real world. But it's not. It's a company that shares what we publish with the people we choose. It's not a society where you need proper morale or ethics to create a place where the individual has the right to say or become what it wants. They make money through advertisement. They have no morale to look after except the profit of their investors. They are protecting their employees by making sure they make money, even in Pakistan. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a closed circuit. You don't need facebook to protect the right of the individual in the real world. Yet. Maybe some time in the future nations will recognize facebook or something similar as a public space which everyone has the right to have access to, and therefore must include freedom of speech. But it definitely doesn't have to be that way now. We're living in a really cool time where The Network is something we will depend on much more when the capacity of transport diminishes while oil and gas reserves deplete. Maybe our world will slow down its pace soon, we've had a really good half a century at rapid speeds, but it's probably not sustainable. Thank god we developed The Network. It's the single most important invention to the coming centuries.