But regardless of the pressure, when the helium leaks out, it will not be displaced by air. It will leave behind a vacuum. The helium will leak out, but nothing will leak in to replace it.

(Except maybe hydrogen, but there's not much of that in your local air.)

So your metal parts vacuum-weld and tear themselves apart starting at the contacting surfaces, and adding lots of hydrogen to the air around the drives just makes the parts become brittle on their way to failure.

What original AC is saying is that our current medicine doesn't resemble Star Trek style ... We drop blanket bombs into our bodies with the expectation that the evil bits will die a whole lot faster than the good bits, and by the time the evil bits are dead, the good bits are still in a good enough shape to regenerate.

No that is NOT what we do for practically anything but chemotherapy for most cancers (where the difference from normal tissue is very small - a few mutations in signaling systems) and the main difference is that being stuck in reproduction mode makes them somewhat less robust.

Antibiotics are all about targeting one or another chemical mechanism that has one form in the target organism when its equivalen has another - or is absent - in human tissue. There are a LOT of drugs that have been discovered or designed, and the collection consists of enormous numbers of "magic bullets" that each target just one, or a small set, of systems found in particular pathogenic lifeforms, with either negligible, or far lower, side-effects on other systems.

Sure many antibiotics hit a wide range of NON-human life - pathogens and others - because THEY share susceptable versions of the target system or contain systems that are strongly side-effected. Sure the doctors sometimes have to pick drugs with bad side-effects because those are the best choices they have. But the characterization of antibiotic and antiviral drugs as "blanket bombing" has been out of date for more than half a century.

Recent research has shown that chickens are the closest living relative of T. Rex.

Do you have a reference for the research?

If it's true that T.rex is closer to chickens than to pheasants, peafowl, and other Phasianinae, it would mean that the Phasianinae family dates back to before the K-T disaster.

This was all over the mainstream press last April. I was echoing their over-simplified characterizatoin of the research.

It's actually "closest living relative among the set of genetic databases they tested", I.e. chickens, sheep, etc. Chickens happened to be a bird they tested, with aminno acid sequences far closer to those of the collagen recovered from T. Rex - nearly identical, in fact, than those of things like mammals. So don't expect this to re-write taxonomy - or to mean that chickens were any closer - or farter - from T. Rex than their close relatives such as phesants.

Of course there's other evidence that birds were around well before T. Rex. So it may turn out that chickens are closer relatives to T. Rex than, say, bluebirds. (Or maybe bluebirds will turn out to be closer, once they're compared.)

Do dinosaurs taste like chicken?

They ought to. Recent research has shown that chickens are the closest living relative of T. Rex.

... give the patient more time to produce his own antibodies. ... the experimental treatment used on some western patients is basically antibodies.

Right on both counts.

  - Much of why Ebola is so often fatal is that it produces a glycoprotein that interferes with immune system signaling, reducing and delaying the immune system's antibody-mediated specific responses. (Meanwhile the cell damage and foreign protein stimulate the GENERAL responses, which causes self-damage to the body and aids in spreading the infection.) Details on Wikipedia Keeping the virus population and the glycoprotien concentration down by supplying ready-to-go antibodies holds down cell death from infection, self-destruction, and signaliing interference, giving the immune system more time and ability to respond.

  - The drug in question is a mix of three monoclonal antibodies, manufactured by stock genetic engineering techniques.

Injections of extracted antibodies, or blood containing them, has a long history in medicine. They have been used against bacteria, viruses, and poisons such as snake venom. Typically they are made by extracting a blood fraction containing antibodies from an animal which has been recently immunized - and is currently hyper-reactive to - the target disease agent or venom. (This gets a load of mixed antibodies which is heavy with those specific to the target.) They may also be extracted from a human survivor of a disease of interest, or a human in general. (These you might hear being called "human imune globin" or "gamma globulin".)

Downsides include allergic reactions to the animal used (typically a horse) or person providing the globulin, infection with blood-borne diseases (such as Hepatitis C), and reaction against the patient by some antibody in the serum.

Antiseura fell out of use for bacteria with the rise of antibiotics (even for diseases, such as menningitis, where antiseurm treatment had higher success rates). Antiviral drugs and the rise of a number of human viral diseases are pushing it down in preference for viral disease treatments - though better blood tests for viral infections is improving its safety. Nothing, of course, has replaced it for antivenom. It's still used for things like Hepatitis A, Measles, rabies exposure, supplement for certain immune difficiencies, and modulating immune system rejection of liver transplants.

With both the rise of antibiotic and antiviral drug resistance and the development of monoclonal antibody culture (prodcing just the desired antibodies to a target on an industrial scale, with negligible risk of dangerous contamination), expect more use of antiseura in medicine - like this "new experimental ebola drug".

Meanwhile, using antibodies extracted from ebola survivors - or transfusions if a matching donor is available - is the same system and might work just fine. And the technology is simple and cheap enough to be available even in third world countries.

Of course you need to wait until the survivor has recovered enough to have built up antibodies and enough blood to spare. Ideally you should also wait until the virus has cleared. (For instance, with Ebola, semen remains infective for at least two months, so blood likely does. as well.) But if the patient is already infected and likely to die without treatment, that's not an issue.

No but we can lean from it; that and the 'highly successful' intervention in Libya where things are not a great deal better today.

People can argue as much as they want about our "obligations" and if a humanitarian crisis exists or not but there are some really fundamental questions that need answering before we make any moves.

1) Assuming we can use air superiority followed by a somewhat traditional ground force to beat down the "state-like" macro organization that is ISIS; how will we deal with what is left? The Taliban still exists! Al-qaeda still exists. If we don't get them all these groups reorganize or survivors form new groups (ISIS). How do we tell the good guys from the bad after the more 'regular' forces are dispersed? Are we going to raise an army of 500K people again and go house to house? Why will that work better than last time? Why won't we find ourselves right back here in another ten yours a little older and little poorer.

2) Can we politically do this right now. The current president is on his way out in two short years. Much of his core electorate is made up of anti-war types. There is no reason to think his chosen successor whoever that turns out to be is a lock for the election. Our enemies are no stupid they know this. They know if they make the right moves at the right time they might well break our resolve. How do we handle that exactly, We don't even have a solid pro-intervention/anti-intervention trend down our major party lines right now?

3) Could we find the troops required. I doubt there is political will for a draft. The worst of the economic crisis is over. People remember stop loss abuses and heavy leanings on gaurdsmen. There has been a force size reduction in progress now for some time. If we try to muster a serge will folks volunteer?

4) Putin and Assads relationship is a wildcard, given our already tense situation with Russia, is going into Syria (which most seem to agree is needed to really deal with ISIS) kicking a hornets nest, are we prepared to deal with the consequences. We don't seem to be where Ukraine is concerned, not where the rubber meets the road anyway. Nobody is drawing up papers to join them with NATO. The EU is not prepared to stop buying Russian gas, etc.

Honestly I don't think we are doing ourselves any favors with this tuff talk. The best thing to do right now in my mind is sit back and watch, hopefully develop some quality intelligence resources.

Just what we needed another taxing authority.

Really can you point to any contemporary operating system that would NOT free all the memory allocated to a process when it exists? I guess you might mean if your process asks other "servers" to do things like say just exists without closing database connections etc, the other process might not free resources associated with yours but that is not the same thing as a memory leak.

You need to take a step back and consider the actual threat. If you are going to post the ciphered content of your password database on the front page of Slashdot yes the cryptography better be done right.

If you going to keep it on your desktop or on your phone and NOT send it over the network. Than I would say the value it affords you in being able to use longer passwords, with greater randomness, and unique passwords for every account is a win. The only anyone is going to get hold of it is if they pwn your computing device. If they do that than they don't need to beak the crypto they will just wait with the keylogger running for your to unlock it and collect the secret.

At that point though you rather than $PUBLIC_WEBSITE have become the attackers target. Once we are talking about a targeted persistent attack, there is little any of us will do personally to be safe if our attackers are any better equipped/capable than script kiddies.

Yes they are a good idea because you have to consider the threat model. If you were say a political target, or perhaps a famous actress you might have people gunning for your directly in which case you might be right it might not be the best idea to have all the goods in one place.

For most of us though the risk is $WEBSITE we used gets hacked and password hashes (you hope they are at least hashed) leak. If you don't have an obscenely long password 15chars+ that is also not a diction word, name of someone or something popular, etc; someone with a couple video cards will very shortly have the clear text brute forced. They will then go about using your set of credentials and all the others they bruteforced on every other major website out there (use a big bank?) to see if they work.

So for most people YES password managers are GOOD because they encourage passwords to be unique, long, and to have good entropy when used on public sites that are targets.

Now a bunch of folks are going to argue that the corpus of password manager software out there frequently suffers from terrible implantation, used unsound cryptographic methods etc. They are right! If you are use one of those that replicates between devices STOP NOW. Use one on your phone or something that you take everywhere. Make SURE IT IS NOT PART OF ANY CLOUD BACKUP/SYNC etc. Make your backups to an SD card or to your PC on your own wireless or via cable.

For attackers to get hold of the data to try and break into it they will now probably have to pop your box, get some malware running etc, at which point they don't need to download the cipher text and try and crack it, they will just wait for you to unlock it and get what they need from the keylogger or screen shots, clipboard etc directly. So while it would be better if you used a sound tool, as long as its not itself malware and phoning your passwords home or something its probably fine. Hell even a password protected excel sheet is probably good enough (but not advised).

Yes and fortuitously the Constitution defines a process by which it may be amended. Mind you that process was intentionally designed to require many parties with diverse interests to agree, so as to ensure the need is real and it isn't abused.

I agree with your statement but what people *need* to understand about exercise is that its not really about the calories you burn while you are doing its about your overall metabolism.

If you say go hiking most weekends in summer and cross country skiing most weekends in winter, you are going to have a great deal more muscle tissue on your legs are arms than someone who spends their weekends in front of their xbone. You will also have cardio-pulmonary development to support sustained high output.

That muscle tissue and elevated metabolism is going to sit there burning more calories during the week while you sit in the office at your desk. So in the context of exercising to lose weight its not really about the energy expenditure in performing the direct act, its about about turning your body to "run hotter".

citation needed ...
because the broken window fallacy still holds

Indeed.

Using the Obama administration's own numbers, a couple years back, for how much they spent for each job "created or saved", and taking the US median income at the time for the cost->jobs destroyed estimator, I got about a 5:1 ratio. Five destroyed for each "created or saved".

Or more: Thats what would happen if they got the money by taxation. The other options are still worse.

The problem is that the VALUE for the government spending comes out of the economy somewhere else:
  - If they tax it, they just suck it out directly.
  - If they borrow it, it competes for investment money and real job creators don't get to create real jobs and/or have to close or downsize when their funding dries up. (This has an additional multiplier: They have to pay it back, with interest. So it kills still more jobs later.)
  - If they print it, it devalues the other currency. The same number of dollars are spent, but less value is spent. Less jobs are funded as a result.

Unfortunately, the anonymous flaimng lefties only see the obvious jobs "created or saved" and not the "invisible men" laid off or not hired as a result.

Yes that right wing nutjob Harry Reid.

You are probably right but there are some things to consider here.

1) Transporting nuclear waste by rail is not exactly blue sky research. I don't think anyone seriously doubts we can find a way to get that done. Which is not say it will not take a great deal of thinking, research, testing, around the safety engineering of it or that it would be expensive to do.

2) It may prove politically impossible to ever transport these materials on a large scale. After the recent accidents with oil on rail, have the public pretty squeamish, about hazardous materials moving thru their back yards. Decades of propaganda have lots of people afraid and opposed to atomic* or nuclear* in general. In the wake of Fukushima we have already seen major western nations shutter their nuclear generating. If these trains were ready to roll today and there was a disposal site, politics would never let it happen. So there may be no need to undertake 1.

3) For practical reasons there may never be any disposal site. First for technical reasons breaders probably still make more sense, and solve the spent fuel problem. If we move in that direction most of the spent fuel isn't spent at all and it may be better to keep where it is now so its accessible. Reduces the need for 1, although only partially we still might need to move the stuff between sites.

4) Politically there may never be a disposal site. Reid has basically killed Yucca. If we can't muster the political will to put a storage facility in sparsely populated low economic value desert I don't know how we'd ever get it done anywhere else.

5) Environmentally it has been determined that even Yucca, most promising spot identified today is really not as ideal as we once thought. There may not be anyplace that is really 'good' to use as a radio active waste dump. Again killing the need for 1.

So in light of the fact that 1 is a known obstacle which we are confident is solvable, while the fundamental issues are more open questions it probably does make more sense to try and resolve the other issues first.