Sterile neutrinos are usually thought of as being produced by mixing with normal neutrinos. Hence the coupling to matter is extremely weak and with such low masses it is quite easy to imagine that they would have escaped detection so far. However neutrinos are produced with velocities near the speed of light in the Big Bang whereas dark matter is slow moving (it's "Cold Dark Matter") so it seems unlikely unless there is some production mechanism which can produce them at a slower velocity. Also, not that it really makes much difference but technically these are gamma rays not x-rays. The energy ranges for both overlap and the name depends on how they are produced - in physics photons from particle decay or annihilation are gamma rays.

...but calculus used to be required at least in the UK for O'level maths. This meant that everyone going to university - even arts students - used to have to know at least simple, basic calculus. I've seen lots of arguments that science and engineering students need to learn better english skills at school and, as a university professor who teaches them, I'd agree it would be beneficial. However the flip side of this is that the arts students need to learn better maths and science skills at school. Since computers are now ubiquitous they should have the rudiments of computer programming just like science students should have the basic skills to explain concepts clearly in writing.

It wouldn't so long as all you expected was a simple file system with data files but without some explanation of the data format, where to find the associated calibration database, geometry database etc. it will be of no use to anyone. So you will need to hire someone to nicely format the data, write documentation on where to find the calibration and geometry databases, etc. etc. This is before you even start to look at the cost of storing the hundreds of petabytes of data - you are looking at about $5 million for the disks alone for 100PB data. Add in RAID arrays and extra disks for the redundancy plus the power to run it all and you are looking at tens to hundreds of millions of dollars plus salaries of the staff to run and maintain it all...just to make data available that perhaps a handful of the public will look at each year.

The data may belong to the public and we may have the means to make it available to them but is this the best way to spend public money? Even if the money came in addition to the normal research grants there are better things to spend it on that this.

By that definition so is just about every medical treatment or procedure ever devised. Any treatment that cures someone and lets them live long enough to reproduce affects the gene pool this include vaccines, antibiotics etc. Indeed you could argue that this problem is itself unnatural since many people with genetic diseases would not live long enough to reproduce in the natural world. So, unless you want to argue that we are better off without any medicine we are already tampering with the gene pool and an increase in genetic disease is likely one consequence. So surely the logical response is to use medicine to cure this problem by getting rid of the defective genes which medicine allowed into the gene pool in the first place?

No, I am worried about the cost of setting up an incredibly expensive system which can serve petabytes of data to the world and then having it sit there almost unused while the hundreds of graduate students and postdocs the money could have funded move on into careers in banking instead of going on to make a major scientific breakthrough which might benefit all society.

Really? That's a rather ironic argument given that you are posting it on the web which was something invented and developed at CERN using publicly funded research money.

So why are you also not complaining that museums with publicly owned collections are not displaying every single item they own? Do you want them to stop researching collections and making acquisitions in the public interest and instead spend money on building thousands of square metres of new display space so every item they own can be displayed?

The public may own the data but there is a cost to making that data publicly available. My own experience has shown that even when that cost is met the public actually have almost no interest in looking at that data. I absolutely zero objections to making all the data publicly accessible provided someone is going to pay for all the network bandwidth, servers, system administration, disk and tape storage, network connections etc. needed to access the data. However as a member of the public I would question whether that is a sensible way to spend all the money required to provide that access and argue that that money would be better going on research. After all that additional money going on data access corresponds to fewer postdocs and graduate students working on the experiment which, unless the data is wildly popular, probably means fewer people using it not more.

Open data is a great idea but it is not always practical. Particle physics experiments generate petabytes of extremely complex, hard to understand data. Making this publicly accessible is extremely expensive and ultimately useless since, unless you understand the innards of the detector and how it responds to particles and spend the time to really understand the complex analysis and reconstruction code there is nothing useful that you can do with the data. In fact one of the previous experiments I worked on went to great trouble to put their data online in a heavily processed and far easier to understand format in the hope that theorists or interested members of the public would look at the data. IIRC they got about 10 hits on the site per year and 1 access to the data.

So I agree with the principle that the public should be able to access all our data but for experiments with massive, complex datasets there needs to be a serious discussion about whether this is practical given the expense and complexity of the data involved. Do we best serve the public interest if we spend 25% of our research funding on making the data available to a handful of people outside the experiments with the time, skills and interest to access it given that this loss in funds would significantly hamper the rate of progress?

Personally I would regard data as something akin to a museum collection. Museums typically own far more than they can sensibly display to the public and so they select the most interested items and display these for all to see. Perhaps we should take the same approach with scientific data. Treat it as a collection of which only the most interesting selections are displayed to/accessible by the public even though the entire collection is under public ownership.

Sorry but you are wrong there - the mechanism to acquire a sin is clearly documented here. They even keep a SIN record - which is why Canadians are always so nice to everyone. ;-)

You might as well ask whether the act of making a hammer is evil. Robots are tools and, like any tool, whether they act for good or evil depends on the intent of their user. Making a tool look like a human does not make a difference. Nobody classifies doll manufacturers as evil because they make toys that look like humans.

Yes, it's free. Just like the first visit. Having a national health service has its benefits! ;-)

Arghh bridge, not bride!

Not really. Would you hire a civil engineer who gave no guarantee that his bride would not fall down?

Surely that's more the area of cosmetology? It can answer fascinating questions like will the universe end in heat death due to hair dryer misuse.

Actually the builder offers a guarantee that the wall will be built to industry standards. Since there are lots of people who can build walls without serious flaws the industry standard is that the wall has no serious flaws and the builder will usually offer a guarantee to that effect - or at least the contract will not contain any exceptions for serious flaws. Indeed nobody would hire a builder who's contract stated that they offered no guarantee.

In software it is not possible in practice for someone to write a non-trivial program without any bugs. Hence it is not common practice to expect completely bug-free code and contracts usually have stipulations to that effect - just look at all the exceptions and explicit non-guarantees in your typical EULA. Essentially the cost of offering a guarantee like the builder's would be so astronomical that nobody would hire you.

This is why they call it the _united_ states: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, QGP, BEC - it's all the same to them. ;-)