I only got a chance to scan the paper, but my impression is this. The difference is that the split electron wavefunction is creating a bubble in the liquid helium. Splitting a quantum wavefunction is rather boring: it's pretty easy, all you need is a finite barrier to produce tunneling, or a double-slit to produce separate paths, or a bunch of other ways. What this experiment does, though (if they're correct about the cause) is show that the split wavefunction actually affects the matter through which it travels (creating a bubble), proportional to the amount of wavefunction that splits off, without counting as a "measurement" which would collapse the wavefunction and place the electron definitely inside one bubble or another.

Or, to put it another way, it shows that matter not only behaves like a wave when traveling (which was very well known in quantum mechanics), but can do so even when interacting with matter. That is fairly novel (AFAIK) in QM, since usually such interactions either cannot be measured or collapse the wavefunction into a particle-like behavior. It's a lot closer to directly measuring the wavefunction (or it's amplitude, anyways) itself than most QM experiments allow.

Reads more like an ad for Matlab (with 2 links to Mathworks and 1 to the Wikipedia Matlab page in TFA) than a job ad. Though I suspect what actually happened was the reporter heard Jonathan Rosenberg mention Matlab (which the reporter hadn't heard of before) and got all excited over his "discovery" when anyone who's likely to get any kind of data analysis/statistics job for, well, anyone, already knows what Matlab is.

Although if anyone does find something dark brown and gooey in that text, I'd advise them not to try eating it, as it's probably not chocolate.

Kant is even older than that, and yet you don't see him being taught in high school either. The age of an idea has little to do with the complexity of the idea, and quantum mechanics is quite complicated, if you want to really understand it. Shakespeare is only widely taught because, due to cultural influences, he is considered something that everyone should know, and his plays aren't really all that hard to understand. Quantum mechanics, orbital dynamics, E&M, etc., not so much. It's not simply because they're hard, either, though those subjects are: it's simply because, unless you're going into a field that requires it, you really don't need to know them, just as the physicist doesn't need to know Kant.

Because giving a bunch of humans a boring,monotonous job doesn't solve the problem of humans making errors, which is what caused this release in the first place.

That's exactly what they are. It's pretty trivial to take, say, GTX 440, and reflash the firmware to report that it's a GTX660. It's extremely difficult to make a fake nvidia card that isn't actually an nvidia card that actually works as a video card and isn't completely obviously a fake. The story was even on slashdot.

IANAL, so I can't say for sure, but it's unlikely. The magistrate didn't rule on a matter of law, only on a matter of procedure (i.e. how to serve a notice). Judges in most cases are typically free to set procedural changes if necessary at their discretion, no precedent required. It's not a formal court decision, it's a discretionary alteration to formal procedure made necessary by the difficulty in contacting the ex-wife. And of course it's a low level judge anyways: their decisions of any kind tend to carry very little weight with other courts.

Of course, other judges who hear about the case may decide on their own judgment to do likewise, but there is nothing legally obligating or even inclining them to do so.

Irony: calling the American Midwest "unpopulated", yet calling someone else (who points out that the Midwest is not, in fact, unpopulated) a "blithering nincompoop."

The word you may have meant to use is underpopulated. I know language is complicated, but despite sharing several letters, "un" and "under" do not, in fact, mean the same thing.

Sincerely - One of the tens of millions of people who live in the Midwest.

I often agree with Randall, but in this case I think he's (mostly) wrong. Yes, ideas are tested by experiment. Properly constructed experiments. That means repetition, controls, statistics, the whole nine yards. If scientists used Mythbusters-style experiments we'd still think light objects inherently fall faster than heavy ones (after all, most lighter objects do fall slower than heavier ones, thanks to air resistance). You don't think people in the "unscientific darkness" didn't actually try out a lot of the things they got wrong? Of course they did. They got it wrong because they ran their experiments improperly. And Mythbuster's often does as well. To be fair, "it didn't work this time, lets try it out 99 more times to make sure" doesn't really make entertaining television, and that's generally all Mythbuster's is: entertainment. They have the seeds of science (experimentation), but science is far more than that alone. The problem is, when people look at what they do as actually being science, they end up thinking you can confirm a scientific theory with a single experiment run with 20 minutes of work. And the conclusion to that thought process is looking at the weather report and dismissing global warming because it's a particularly chilly summer. Or saying "hmm, well [some action] didn't kill me this time, it must be perfectly safe."

Scientifically educated people don't come to that conclusion, of course, but those people aren't the problem.

I did do an Internet search, and in fact found plenty of research that indicates humans and other mammals can in fact localize sound in the vertical plane (i.e. whether it comes from in front of behind of you). Of course, it doesn't work for all sounds, but the capability is there.

They don't. From the full paper:

You can't just record an indefinite length movie with this thing, you basically need to alter the hardware to record longer segments (since it has different physical elements detect different frames of the signal).

It may be just noise, but is it different noise between different power lines (and if so, consistently different)? If so, it's a fingerprint. Noise can be information if you're looking for a specific kind of noise. Not all noise is identical, and if you can fingerprint that noise, you can use it to determined the source.

Granted, that's a pretty big "if". I have no idea if powerline noise is consistent enough to be fingerprinted, different enough for a useful comparison, or strong enough to be picked up by standard recording devices. But it could be possible, in theory.

Though, for a satellite, landing can also be optional.

Planck has yet to release their polarization data, so BICEP2 couldn't use it. To be clear, they also didn't use just the Planck data: the paper lists five different models for dust polarization, only one of which (DDM1) was constructed from what little Planck data they had available. All of them showed fairly tiny amounts of polarization from dust compared to their signal, hence the conclusion that it was a cosmological polarization (there were other reasons for that conclusion as well, of course). They published the conclusions they had based on the information they had available. That's how science works. You publish the results you got (with the uncertainties you calculated), the community looks at it to see if you made obvious errors, then tries to replicate or disprove it.

I can't find an exact altitude for these satellites, but O3b (whom Google is working with on this project) is putting satellites in orbits 5,000 miles above Earth, which is definitely not LEO. That's lower than conventional geosynchronous communications satellites (which sit ~22,000 above Earth), but well above the low-Earth orbit cutoff (which is roughly 1,000 miles and below). At 5,000 miles, the atmosphere is thin enough to be considered non-existent. Now, Google might be looking at lower orbits for these newer satellites, but they haven't said yet.