The cost of launching anything is staggering, and it gets more stupendously staggering with the size of the orbit. Each probe is important. We are nowhere near having so much data about our solar system -- forget the universe as a whole -- that any single operating probe should be considered junk.

Depends on the field. Some conferences are very hard to get into, and there is a rigorous peer-review process (I can think of two of the conferences in my field with acceptance rates at or below 30%). Others accept essentially anything and everything (like those semi-scam conferences in China I keep getting invited to). I'd wager, however, that the majority of meetings are somewhere in the middle, accepting most submissions that sound reasonable, as the organizers trust that the cost of attending and presenting is sufficient disincentive to trolls.

My extremely fuzzy understanding from freshman physics is that the universe is thought to have undergone an expansion early on that was, indeed, faster than light. That post-big-bang period was called "inflation", an idea Dr. Alan Guth came up with (and he happened to be my freshman physics lecturer). So it is possible that two systems that became entangled prior to inflation are now outside each other's light cones.

From the description it sounds like a simple substitution cipher (from their examples, /e/ for /f/, and /n/ for /k/). How hard can that be to decode if you have enough of the text? Yes, neato that we can now read certain notes that have been encoded for 900 years, but were they really only undeciphered that long because no one had a proper, scholarly look at them?

It's one thing to do that inside a car (which is what, 6 x 4 x 9 feet ... or maybe a little larger than that?). It's quite another to do it inside a huge room that's 36 x 30 x 54 feet in size. It's also worth noting that car audio competitions use a single frequency. The LEAP facility is broadband, since it needs to simulate the sound of a launching rocket.

You need two digits to write the number 90. You need four to write the number that represents ten years of days, 3650 (modulo leap years). Sounds like two orders of magnitude. And it's a good example of why orders of magnitude are so rough an estimation.

I'm not an insect biologist, but I'd be surprised if 10+ year old bamboo has any remaining viable insect life when kept as a musical instrument (rather than, say, being left outdoors). The photo from the linked article does not look like something that was freshly cut.

Doing even the most cursory of searches on gallium and reading through the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium) would suggest that gallium is not chemically intert, may not be non-toxic to humans, and given that extremities can easily get cold enough to drop below the freezing point of gallium, I'd have to say that it might rather well leave a residue, forget about the stickiness others have reported.

Yea, that'd be great: inject liquid metal, have it thicken and solidify in your feet and fingertips because you step outside on a brisk day, giving you the equivalent of massive frostbite. No thank you.

There are growing numbers of Chinese researchers in my field (neuroscience) and their results always need to be taken with an extra-large grain of salt. It looks like the same is true here.

Did anyone read the Wikipedia entry?

"Hemerythrin and myohemerythrin are essentially colorless when deoxygenated, but turn a violet-pink in the oxygenated state."

Since much of our skin tone (for lighter colored skins) comes from blood, this is going to make for some VERY interesting looking people!!!

If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen? If time does not yet exist, then there is no was to distinguish an event. By the parent's suggestion, time can only be propelled forward when already in motion, by the contribution of each new event. The very ideas of "first" and "new" presuppose the existence of time, and thus despite this likely significant scientific work, we continue to have a tautology until an instantiation somehow starts things off.

We are still, also, a long way away from understanding what causes wavefunction collapse, since the notion of observation is clearly ludicrous: there are no observers in the center of the sun, or on the far side of Jupiter, as two minor examples.

Indeed, especially since the skills of programming a mechanical engine go many eons farther back with, I believe, the invention of the loom. The result was somewhat different (a woven pattern, rather than a scalar value), but the idea of a set of sequentially executed instructions with loops, counting variables, and exceptions, started a long time before Babbage. Knitting and crocheting is rather quite similar, and embodies similarily pre-existing art, as well.

Terminology. Seems like the parent poster and a lot of other respondents are picking apart the use of the word "meeting" when used as a synonym for scientific conference. Frankly, I've never seen anyone do that before with such misdirected certainty. The OP clearly shows that this is a scientific meeting ("NASA's Lunar Science Forum became the largest scientific gathering..."). In my neck of the world, we have 35,000 people scientific meetings that are also called conferences and even congresses. The smaller ones are called symposia or workshops. I organize one that meets every two years (we explicitly emphasize the more informal interaction phase of such gatherings, which our participants appreciate greatly). Everyone understands that, in that context, "meeting" is a synonym for "conference".

So why all the nit-picking from conflating a scientific meeting with a business meeting? These two beasts are different kinds of events with different goals, different structure, and different levels of participation.

If you read the article, you'll realize that there is a separate laser accelerator necessary BEFORE this chip, and then a second high-power IR laser necessary to drive the chip.

More-or-less, they've increased the efficiency of laser-based electron acceleration. Good on them, but the solution isn't, as the summary suggests by omission, just a small chip alone and nothing else.

More importantly for the parent (I know, I know, don't feed the trolls), the presented accelerator only accelerates electrons, and is intended as a gamma and x-ray source. That's very different from accelerating electrons and positrons to nearly the speed of light, or protons, or atomic nuclei, etc. To do high-energy physics, you need big, big accelerators. The device to accelerate a single subatomic particle to levels where it carries as much energy as a brick dropped on your foot, isn't going to be a crystal a few millimeters on a side.

I run a scientific research lab in a Big University You Have Heard Of. I had a conversation with an intern and a post-doc earlier this week where we talked about figures that could be added to a review paper the intern is working on. I swear I used the words, "I'll make up a figure ..." to describe the actions of collecting the necessary supporting data to create a figure for the paper that my post-doc suggested would be instructional. "Make up" in this case meant, "construct," and wholly lacked nefarious, subversive, or deceptive connotations.

And I speak English as my mother tongue.

The so-called conspiracy to commit fraud here is a bunch of hooey. The only thing the authors are guilty of is not submitting a fully completed manuscript.

Your order-of-magnitude higher ID than the parent poster suggests an explanation.

Myself, I like Courier. But then, I'm in the lower 10x of that equation.

And please, if you're going to criticize someone's choice of font, take a moment to do it with precision and figure out what the name of the font is.