You still can't run away from osmotic pressure. If you have a membrane with a different concentration on each side, the solvent (water in this case) will tend to flow to the more concentrated side. This is true even if the membrane offers no resistance; it's simply diffusion at work. This effect is osmosis. In order to counteract this effect, an additional pressure of water is needed to pass water through the membrane. It's called reverse osmosis because you are opposing the usual behaviour of osmosis. If you run the process in "dead-end" mode like a coffee filter, as many seem to be suggesting here, the problem will not be "clogging", the problem will be the huge pressure build-up as salt at the filter becomes more and more concentrated.

TLDR; it's still reverse osmosis, because no membrane can make osmotic pressure disappear.

All of which is not to say that this isn't a very promising proposal. It shouldn't be toooooo hard to test this in the lab in the near future.

According to the other article people are posting, this is based on Molecular Dynamics simulations. MD is a theoretical technique that uses time-dependent Newtonian mechanics. It relies heavily on having good-quality data for the interactions between the atoms, but allows relatively large systems to be modelled. The wikipedia article contains a fair bit of information (probably too much).

TLDR: This is just based on computational modelling. The model is fairly crude, but is a standard technique for this scale of system and the results should be taken seriously.

In fairness, *sploitation is a pretty accepted formula in exploitation films. Fairly amusing list in the index of this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_film

One could argue that they are making an insightful point by drawing an ingenious parallel between the exploitation of trends and base desires with the rejection of artistic merit for by film-makers for public consumption to the exploitation of the public's addiction to internet services in order to make money out of advertisers who... wait, this isn't parallel at all. It makes the exploitation film makers look like the good guys.

Daily Mail readership: 4,371,000 (http://www.nmauk.co.uk/nma/do/live/factsAndFigures?newspaperID=10#readership)
The Sun readership: 7,652,000 (http://www.mediauk.com/newspapers/13707/the-sun/readership-figures) [A lot of these people will only look at the tits and sports]
UK population: 62,232,000 (http://data.worldbank.org/country/united-kingdom)
UK electorate in 2010 general election: 45,597,461 (http://www.ukpolitical.info/2010.htm)
Votes in 2010 general election: 27,833,834 (http://www.ukpolitical.info/2010.htm)

It's impressive, to be sure, but I think these papers rather exaggerate their influence.

We didn't vote for it, and we actually voted against it. None of this stuff was in the manifesto of either of the parties in the ruling coalition. They were highly critical of similar legislation when proposed by their opponents, who were turfed out in the last general election. We've had such a long run of crazy authoritarian Home Secretaries now that it's pretty clear somebody or something is getting to them, possibly through their office (or bedroom) window.

What did you use to write this post?

Pharmaceutical companies employ a significant proportion of the world's best and brightest organic chemists, and supply them with all the chromatography and spectroscopy equipment they need. Pharmaceutical products generally consist of a single highly-pure active ingredient, maybe with some kind of safe filler or binder to get it into a safely dosable form. Adding materials which would frustrate reverse-engineering for any significant period of time, while maintaining the efficacy and safety of your product, would be a huge effort. Chromatography is good at separating materials – that's why it is used. Essentially, we would have an arms race which would not only cost a lot of money (and raise prices), but waste the time of many brilliant minds which are sincerely dedicated to helping people get better.

Of course, under the patent system, we have companies developing and patenting technology that they have no intention of using, simply to block their competitors.

*Obligatory grumbling at human nature and blaming Ayn Rand*

I expect geeks to care. Sometimes I do forget just how IT-oriented the Slashdot community is, given the number of articles about general science/engineering.

Ok, you got me. The article is pretty good.

I'd imagine they were "using concrete" rather than "using a solid"?

Actually, what with the graduate employment situation it probably won't be long before paving crews *do* have mechanical engineering degrees

I'm getting fed up of the constant references to the magical properties on "non-Newtonian" fluids. Non-Newtonian fluids have a huge range of properties in terms of their response to shear and change over time. This is constantly abused by geeks who should know better. Off the top of my head:

What people usually mean is a "shear-thickening" fluid such as corn starch and water. These become more effectively viscous in response to shear.

"Shear-thinning" fluids are *also* non-Newtonian, are fairly common, and have the exact opposite behaviour. Ketchup is a great example - shaking the bottle helps it flow more easily.

Another interesting case are Bingham plastics - these have a yield stress before they will flow. The classic example is toothpaste - it will stay as a lump on the bristles under its own weight, but spreads easily enough under pressure.

So the next time somebody wants to demonstrate non-Newtonian properties on their speaker cone, pass the ketchup!

Yeah, same issue here. Do they want time per core, per CPU, per node, per system? The differences are pretty drastic Also: I've had some local calculations running in the background of a desktop PC for the last week. Does that count as "my PC use"? A little flexibility is useful to allow for outliers, but this amount of ambiguity just means nobody can answer.

iTerm2

That's... pretty much exactly what it does? You don't have to keep things in the dock if you don't want to, and you can also set it to auto-hide. The setting is really easy to find, it's in several places. I keep TextEdit in the dock; it's a great way to open arbitrary files as plain text (you just drag them onto the icon), which is very useful for scientific computing.

I only really have two major criticisms at the moment with OSX: some useful things are hidden from the Finder by default (root directory, library), and the multiple workspace handling has regressed between Snow Leopard and Lion; for some bizarre reason you can't drag things between workspaces in Mission Control.

UK student here. If the tuition fees U-turn was simply a party "manifesto pledge" that they had to compromise on, that would be acceptable. Painful, but acceptable. This defence that "you can't expect us to achieve everything we want to if we don't win" is a straw man used to deflect valid criticism. The NUS pledge was a personal pledge written in unambiguous language and signed by every subsequently-elected Liberal Democrat MP.

They can't reasonably claim to have been tricked into agreeing to this, and the wording clearly allows for any electoral outcome. Those who broke the pledge have no personal integrity remaining. If you can't trust them to keep a publicly-signed unambiguous personal promise, what can you believe? I'd have strong reservations about believing Nick Clegg's word even under oath in court, and he's the party leader.

This is quite significant if true, I know a few people who'd be interested. Citation?

...and the follow up: not charged, found to have acted in reasonable self-defence. Are you saying that when a man admits to stabbing somebody to death, but claims self-defence, the legal process is not necessary?