Housing is the big problem in the UK. It costs a huge fraction of your income to rent or buy. Many of the foreigners doing the job are prepared to live in worse conditions and can therefore get by on the wages.

Mass production- of graphene powder. Cambridge Nanosystems' process makes flakes of graphene in the 200-800 nm diameter range; cf. this interview with their chief scientist. It's still a valuable material with many potential uses; that interview talks about composite materials and conductive inks. However, it's a very different product with different applications from a large-scale monolayer sheet.

"National Security" is the root password to the Constitution - me

It's a little hard to believe it's insulation degradation despite that .au recalls website entry. When insulation degrades, you tend to get short circuits that trip circuit breakers rather rapidly. It seems more likely to be an undersized or underprotected conductor, e.g., a multistrand conductor in which flexing from improper strain relief can break most of the strands, increasing the local series resistance and heat dissipation and possibly leading to a complete conductor failure with series arcing. Only an arc-fault protector would trip on a failure like this, and those breakers are still uncommon in the US even though they're required in much new construction. It would also seem that cord failures would be more likely in North America, Japan and other 100-120V countries because a universal switching supply producing a given amount of power will require twice the line current draw and produce 4x the heat dissipation (I^2 R) in a high resistance section of cord as it would in a country with a 230-240V supply voltage.

The original paper for this was discussed yesterday on In The Pipeline. The point was raised that the mechanism involved, the JAK-STAT signalling pathway is used quite broadly throughout the body in the control of cell growth and differentiation. There are several Janus Kinase (that's JAK) inhibitors already on the market or in development, and they are powerful immunosuppressants indicated for the treatment of things like rheumatoid arthritis or leukemia. They tend to be the sorts of drugs whose advertisements say stuff like, "Xeljanz may increase your risk of serious infection." Notably, Xeljanz (tofacitinib) popped up in the news a few months ago when it was used to grow hair in a patient with alopecia universalis (who was already taking the drug for an autoimmune disease) and the headlines exclaimed that a cure for baldness was on the horizon. Now, a single drug that burns fat, grows hair, and relieves psorasis sounds like a miracle, but the reality is that's a sign that these compounds act more broadly than is desirable.

As the paper's authors themselves put it:

The utility of JAK inhibition as a therapeutic strategy for obesity is complicated by the well-described role of this signalling pathway in the immune system. In fact, tofacitinib is approved in the United States to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Thus, if one were to imagine targeting adipose tissue by in vivo administration of an IFN–JAK–STAT inhibitor or similar compound it would almost certainly need to be delivered locally and prevented from spreading systemically or alternatively targeted selectively to white adipocytes. One could also conceive of a cell-based therapy wherein JAK inhibition of patient-derived adipocytes ex vivo is followed by transplantation to treat obesity, but this therapeutic modality would need to overcome numerous and significant obstacles before becoming a reality.

Most importantly, it's not just NASA -- the NSF and NIH also have above-inflation budget increases, after several years of stark cuts. I was worried that this was going to be cannibalizing one science for another, but that doesn't appear to be the case!

[TMB]

Except he is referring to solar on rooftops so the 30 MW would be spread over much larger than a half kilometer.

All of what you said makes sense except the seconds time scale. If the power company can't see changes until they are in dire need in seconds that is a problem they need to solve. Clouds do not generally cover large generation areas in seconds (minutes maybe). That being said having a local battery storage would be good but I doubt most users would want to cycle their batteries to benefit the power company especially when they will want that power when they get home and want a warm/cold home.

Canada has FPTP and has had at least 3 major parties every election for decades (at times up to 5). It's more the case that when you have 2-party FPTP, it is very hard to break out of it... but if you start off with more viable parties, it can remain that way.

Which is not to say that I endorse FPTP in any way, shape or form. We all know that Arrow's Theorem says that no voting system satisfies all the axioms you would like a voting system to adhere to, but some violate the axioms more often and in more egregious ways than others. FPTP is more egregious at the individual level than almost any alternative.

The problem with Arrow's Theorem is that it is really about what happens for a choice amongst a few individuals (like a presidential election), while the majority of countries have parliamentary systems in which it is the aggregate of all of the individual choices that determines the government. If you ask what government you get as a result of all of those individual FPTP elections, its faults vis-a-vis Arrow's Theorem are usually not too bad. Which is probably why FPTP persists despite the fact that it does badly at the individual level -- people tend to agree that the government it produces at the national level usually reflects the will of the people.

Because of inherent drift, inertial navigation is inherently suited only to fast vehicles that get to where they're going in just a few minutes or hours, e.g., planes and missiles. Cargo ships do not qualify. It is best combined with GPS to "flywheel" through outages (e.g., vehicles in tunnels) and so it can be automatically recalibrated whenever GPS is available.

Besides LORAN-C, there used to be another low frequency radio navigation system even better suited for global shipping: Omega. It operated on even lower frequencies, in the 10-14 kHz (yes, kHz) range, and had worldwide reach unlike LORAN-C which was only regional. It was shut down in 1997.

I certainly wouldn't bet that GPS satellites couldn't be destroyed, but most anti-sat weapons demonstrated so far work only on low altitude orbits. The US systems consist essentially of lobbing a small suborbital missile up in the path of the target satellite. Destroying a GPS satellite in a 20,000 km orbit takes a much bigger launch vehicle and considerably more time, and would be much harder to conceal from US space sensors.

Jamming and spoofing are the much bigger threats.

LORAN-C would probably be rather resistant to EMP. Like just about everything military, the transmitting equipment would be designed to be EMP-resistant, and receiving equipment on vehicles would not be particularly susceptible. It's stuff with long cables that picks up EMP. LORAN-C is certainly much more jam-resistant than GPS. The transmitter power levels are/were enormously higher, some in the megawatt range, to overcome natural background noise and antenna inefficiency. Even the large towers used are only a small fraction of a wavelength (3 km). Also, LORAN-C operates by groundwave propagation (that's why the frequency is so low) so it's not very sensitive to solar activity.

That was probably LORAN-A, with which we used to share the 160m band (1.8-2.0 MHz). LORAN-C operates (or operated) in a dedicated allocation at 100 kHz. LORAN-A was shut down quite a few decades ago.

Actually, the US military has a very simple way of selectively shutting down GPS: they locally jam the L1 frequency. The satellites also transmit on a second frequency, L2, with an encrypted, high precision "P(Y)" code for which the keys are closely controlled. They have receivers that can work with just the P(Y)-code, so it doesn't matter to them if L1 is jammed.

This statement and the one in the summary assert that US cultural trends are inherent and immutable. Look at other countries that have different cultural norms and you will find that India has a booming female coding population. If US cultural norms make it so women do not feel comfortable entering fields is that the fault of women as your statement and the summary's seem to imply? In my opinion, as there is sufficient evidence that the situation in CS (and other fields) in the US is cultural not biological it is societies problem to change the cultural norms. The US will lose out on great ideas if the culture systematically inhibits women from entering the field.