I made it my goal two years ago to read all the Hugo and Retro-Hugos, but soon I started looking at the BASF list and Seiun Awards (Japanese Nebula Award), it just keeps on going! At the moment I've only 10 books to go for the Hugos, but then you start to look at the runner ups and think... hmmmm.... But I agree those lists are great places to start. I always have a simple database in my phone to check up on what i have/haven't read when i'm at a used book store ( the used bookstore near Monroeville mall outside of Pittsburgh and Strange Maine, Portland were some serious treasure troves!)

Relating physics to some other delicious item might make this discussion more satisfactory.

Fetal Bovine Serum. This is still the medium that's used for the growth of such vat burgers. I haven't found any articles that explicitly state the growth medium for these tissues, but I have often seen this as the medium for various cell growth. I'd like to see improvements on the actual growth medium not being tied to the meat industry, otherwise it seems like another addition to the inefficiency chain before that steak gets eaten.

wvmarle, are you in the e-scrap waste business? I'm inquiring because I'm currently doing research on the capability of a fully automated dissassembly plant and was wondering if you had any robotics implemented in your processes or if manual labor may be involved instead for breakdown of parts.

You're right to point out the serious issues of trying to recycle mixed polymer plastics. While we're all familiar with downcycling, your post reminded me about the costs of separation processes, and I thought i might drag up my old book. From Humphrey and Keller's Separation Process Technology "Plants commonly have from 40% to 70% of both capital and operating costs in separations."

Polymer blends provide desired properties from their individual components, but the amount of energy that would be required to break those down and at a desired purity (not considering the minute amount of catalyst often consumed in the polymerization process as well as flame retardants and other additives fuzzyfuzzyfungus pointed out ) just makes it too costly to break down the polymer blend into the purity levels that companies want in their raw materials.

The article discusses health care as the main industry that's important to have 24hr information connection, and by utilizing mobile devices that information and connectivity can be available 24/7. This is then generalized, saying because it works there all companies should utilize this opportunity to get a high ROI on employee efficiency. While we've all seen these posts before, what other industries require 24 hr access from all employees? I know managers and the like in most all businesses often are required to be on-call, but this seems to be addressing the lesser employees, as in the manager contacts his/her subordinate, making the subordinate more or less be on-call. Does anyone have such circumstances (besides power plants/industry and manufacturing)? Is it often outlined in your contracts?

A bit of an incomplete thought here, but I wonder about the possibilities of utilizing these plumes as a source for raw materials for polymers. The one word "plastics" is still as important today as it has been for the past 70 years. Bioplastics is coming along well but why not use what's coming out of the earth at a rapid rate? The purity would certainly be of concern, and any sulfur may result in catalyst poisoning, but I wonder if there may be a benefit towards collection and purification? There's research out of UC Davis ( http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/04/1014804108 ) identifying getting high enough pressures and temperatures (though ~50 Gpa ) we can get some more complex hydrocarbons. Not to burn off, but to make polymer materials. Utilizing the gas as a source of energy for this process would be useful, but definitely trying to think of ways around burning such useful material. Of course it would be cost effective to do it near the source, and I doubt anyone wants Union Carbide on the arctic landscape, but this is just something I was thinking about. Cost to benefit ratios will probably prove me wrong though.

That's the first image that immediately came to mind when I saw this picture. Not the awesomeness of the universe, but someone's bum. Tragic.

Could this then be considered a MoS-COS-MOS?

Maybe we'll find David Brin's creatures wandering about.

I don't enjoy how he identifies 9 notes for a scale (or identifies it as a rule.) 9 chords to identify the numbers and leaving 0 as a rest, it's an ok interpretation, but I hope there's something better out there. The whole thing sounds and looks like a "made on a Mac" hipster nonsense.

Have you read "The Wanderer" by Fritz Leiber? Might be a good start.

DON'T APNIC! Incredibly lame, I know...