Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment thanks (Score 1) 243

Thanks, a bit of fresh air...

Every time I hear "dark matter" (ok, I can accept that in exchange for a beer), or "dark energy" (holy s**t), I really think that cosmologist & co. are under-appreciating how embarrassing it is for the rest of the Physicists community. Seriously, name it "the mistery of cosmic expansion" or whatever, but Energy??

Simple read against the term "dark energy":

https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.396...

Comment Re: Crank physics (Score 2) 243

Active quantum physicist here. "Dark matter and dark energy are the two leading explanations so far" Absolutely not!! " Dark matter and dark energy have specific definitions" I call bullshit: They are placeholders for some "cosmic substance" (in some equation of state) for which you have no explanation . Dark energy is even more flagrant a name than dark matter (see arXiv:1002.3966 for a recognized expert's opinion)

Submission + - SPAM: Radiant Aims To Replace Diesel Generators With Small Nuclear Reactors

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water. Founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, who decided the Mars colony power sources they were researching would make a bigger impact closer to home, Radiant has pulled in $1.2 million from angel investors to continue work on its reactors, which are specifically designed to be highly portable, quick to deploy and effective wherever they're deployed; remote communities and disaster areas are early targets.

The military is another key market here; a few of these could power an entire military base in a remote area for four to eight years before expending its "advanced particle fuel," eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel for this purpose. Those trucks will still have to run – up until the point where the military ditches diesel in all its vehicles – but they'll be much less frequent, reducing a significant risk for transport personnel. Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - The Oddest UFO Case You Probably Never Heard About (kron4.com)

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: While the 'Tic-Tac' UFO phenomenon has dominated headlines over the course of the last few years, an equally well-documented UFO case occurred almost a decade ago but never managed to make the mainstream news cycle.

On April 25, 2013 at around 9:20 PM something odd was spotted by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Dash-8 turboprop on a routine mission over Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The pilots had seen a 'pinkish to reddish light' out over the Atlantic ocean, along with personnel from the local airport control tower. As the lights approached the shore the lights went out and the aircraft crew then switched on their thermal imaging system to get a fix on the object — which is when the video begins. Referred to in the report as the 'unknown', it then proceeds to put on quite a show for its observers including darting between trees just above residential streets at an estimated 80-100 MPH, passing over the local airport's runway causing a takeoff delay, submerging beneath the surface of the ocean while managing to maintain its speed underwater, resurfacing a short time later and then ultimately separating into two discreet objects while still flying before the objects disappear from view. What makes this interesting is that the video has corroberating radar data obtained via a FOIA request and was independently observed by staff in the airport control tower and closely examined by a group of analysts from the government and private sectors working with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. They concluded that "this video is the best documentation of an unknown aerial and submerged nautical object exhibiting advanced technology that the authors of this report have seen."

It bears mentioning that in an eerily similar case, a floating object caught the attention of a DHS surveillance flight over the rough desert terrain near Tucson, Arizona in 2019. The object in question, filmed for at least 40 minutes by a FLIR camera (again at night), travels through the air on a seemingly fixed path. The object, which at times takes on a 'rubber duck' like shape, sometimes appears to separate into two distinct pieces that follow the same course and speed. Although it has been suggested that this is nothing more than a collection of wayward balloons or possibly some type of drone, it is clear the plane's occupants had a keen interest in whatever it was.

Comment Re: Something to be concerned about (Score 1) 70

by f3r (#61204870) Attached to: $100 Million Solar Geoengineering Research Program Proposed
Researcher in Spain, founder and stock-holder of a spin-off: this is how it's done here, the patents belong to CSIC (national science organization, state owned), and/or the university (most of them state owned). When the spin-off works and starts making money, they give researchers (inventors) like 30% of royalties (through CSIC's licensing of its patents to the spin-off). CSIC can also become (minority) stock-holder, but it does not happen often. Still, most of the money goes to stock-holder researchers when the spin-off is bought by a major player, being royalties a really small part of the benefit produced by the publicly funded research.

Comment Re:Microsoft helped majorly in the project (Score 1) 291

by f3r (#40603001) Attached to: Why Were So Many "Crazy" Higgs Boson Stories Published?

Microsoft provided research to CERN, not OS. .

evidence please?

CERN probably used Linux because it's highly customizable.

LOL. Playing adult games with baby toys? Sure you do not even begin to grasp the computational tasks that are to be done in order to make a 5 sigma discovery of such heavy particle. You probably have a desktop-level knowledge of OSes, dont you? you could check the numbers, like data flow, amount of storage, flops etc which are needed in CERN...

Unlike FOSS zealots, they understand the importance of using right tool for the job

sorry to wake you up from your nice dreams, Linux is the only tool used in serious science, unless propietary hardware suffers from the windows lock-down. That's why you'll see more windows boxes in labs than in theory departments (in fact it is rather hard to see a theorist using anything but linux)

Comment cannot be otherwise (Score 1) 291

by f3r (#40602819) Attached to: Why Were So Many "Crazy" Higgs Boson Stories Published?
(senior quantum physicist)
"may be one of the most important scientific discoveries ever"
BS. Science does not evolve by critical jumps made by one person in one tiny micro-region of science space. It evolves by hordes of scientists opening new fronts all over. (comment: it might well be the most expensive and publicised in the whole history of science, though)

"Is the particle's discovery just on the fringe of common scientific knowledge"
Isn't that 100% redundant? every discovery is at the fringe by definition.

Some days ago I was telling a friend that every time my parents come with a "hey, have you heard about (...) scientific discovery?" it takes me at least 10 minutes to relate the newspaper's title to the real news, even if the news belong to my field of research. Even if journalists were not interested in sensationalizing the news, and even if they were not complete idiots, which I am sorry to know they are, they could NEVER post reasonable scientific news, because they do not understand the content. No matter how much you try to explain the Higgs mechanism, lay people are never going to understand it, you need the maths for that, no way around. They could grasp some fairy-tale-ishly drawn picture of an approximate explanation, but never the reality. This is such an obvious concept to people who are expert at a given field: you can only understand what you know about, in other fields you are just like a little baby wandering in the dark.

But, hey, let's keep with the false illusion that being mediocre and ignorant is no problem at all.

Comment iaap (Score 0) 568

by f3r (#40123479) Attached to: Germany Sets New Solar Power Record
when energy ceases to be the problem, entropy will. You just cannot process infinite energy in a given volume. There is space left to wonder what the next major disaster will be.
Education

Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 567

Posted by timothy from the only-surprising-because-it's-true dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"

Comment Re:I thought they already knew why corona is hotte (Score 3, Informative) 111

by f3r (#33473530) Attached to: NASA Preps Closest-Ever Sun Mission
from what I know, all that is based on heavy numerical simulations (prone to errors in the assumptions, lack of more thorough numerics, etc). The simulations are based on parameters determined from measurements made from distances longer than those that will be reached with this new probe, and on assumptions also extrapolated from everything observed "from here". Summed up, that explanation could be right or completely wrong. We have to measure more and from smaller distances.

Slashdot Top Deals

Waste not, get your budget cut next year.

Close