Fukushima's failure was due to technology in that it relied on continuous power to provide essential cooling even after the reactor was powered off. Even putting the emergency generators on a hill would not help if, instead of a tsunami, the hillside they were on collapsed due to the earthquake. You would then be arguing that it was 'human stupidity' to put all the generators on a hill instead of in a basement. For me the 'human stupidity' factor was that they did not insist on flying in backup generators as a number one priority after the tsunami. However I would also argue that the technology itself is also flawed since it requires continuous cooling even after the reactor is subcritical.

Really? More unsafe than letting these people drive themselves because that is what we have now? Besides I imagine that it will be a lot easier to put restrictions on an autonomous car e.g. teenager can only go to destinations within a radius of x km from home, certain regions of a city can be blocked off as no-go areas, dementia patients could have destinations limited to certain fixed locations etc.

...and while arguing that autonomous driving systems, which replace drivers, are scary because there are idiots driving cars.

Sorry but this is simply wrong. Look up synchrotron radiation. For electrons this is a very important effect and your machine energy is limited by how much energy you can give to the electrons on each orbit of the machine. Even for the protons in the LHC this is a noticeable, but not energy limiting, effect.

Remember that the accelerator is in a tunnel usually through rock. Unless there is a fault line through the ring - which would be really stupid - the accelerator will be shaken and will need realignment but the damage should not be enormous. They have very successful accelerators in Japan.

True but a circular design for a electron-positron collider is far from the most efficient. At the energies needed to create the Higgs the energy loss caused by bending the electrons around in a ring means that the ring has to be far longer in circumference than a 'one-shot' linear collider would need to be. Worse if we find something even more exciting like Supersymmetry in our next run of the LHC starting this coming March you will never be able to increase the energy of a circular e-p machine to study it whereas with a linear collider you can extend it.

A circular machine only makes sense with heavier particles like protons but I question whether the cost savings of a single tunnel for both an e-p machine and a future proton machine will outweigh the massive increase in the cost of the magnets and accelerating cavities for the e-p machine.

A Darth Vader voice would be more fun for misbehaving kids:

"I find your lack of behaviour disturbing"

"I am your father"

"That was before you misbehaved, now I am altering the deal...pray I do not alter it any further."

"I hope so for your sake, your mother is not as forgiving as I am”

Sort of but I'm thinking that it is more about the process vs. result. Convergent evolution is about the end results: there appear to be only a certain number of basic eye designs which work and so evolution tends to converge on one of these solutions no matter where it starts. This result is talking about the fact that given the same starting point and the same environment identical organisms will evolve in the same way i.e. there are not just stable solutions which you arrive at but stable paths along which you travel to get there.

Anyway this is definitely the most interesting bioscience result I've seen in a while so I'll have to quiz my biological colleagues about it when I get the chance!

It does not appear to be quite the same thing as convergent evolution (but I'm a physicist not a biologist!). My understanding of covergent evolutions is that it is when two wildly different evolutionary paths end up with the same solution to a problem e.g. an octopus eye and a human eye are functionally very similar even though our last common ancestor certainly had nothing like it.

This is rather the claim that evolution is reproducible in the short term i.e. if you put the same strain of bacteria in the same conditions they will evolve in the exact same way and not find different evolutionary paths to the same goal. This means that evolution becomes predictable and you can then predict with some degree of accuracy how a virus, bacteria or cell will evolve. This has obvious applications for disease control and perhaps cancer too.

I understood that, or at least guessed that this was the reason. However when you are restricting the connection like that yourself you cannot go and claim that it is the fault of the other party. Either you need to admit that the limiting factor is your own internal network or you need to spend some of the large amount of cash that is flowing in from your subscribers to upgrade that network to handle it instead of using it to see whether you can break the record for executive bonuses.

I'm in no way condoning the OP since I have no idea of the problems Australia faces but your rebuttal argument here is a primary school level one. The bad behaviour of a government in an adjacent continent (geographically Australia is not part of Asia, it's a continent by itself) does not give every nearby government a license to misbehave and even if it did Europe is also adjacent to Asia and by your logic is in the same situation. Besides if you are going to pick an Asian government to compare yourself to why not North Korea? Using your argument this would suggest it is ok to use famine as a carbon reduction strategy.

The moral of this is that if you are going to make an unpopular decision for reasons that you believe are important stand up and be honest about your reasoning. People might disagree but at least we can have an honest debate about the real points. Indeed I thought that open and frank speaking was a well known and widely admired Australian trait?

This is not a fantasy it is a useful result. Previously it was thought that negative mass was fundamentally incompatible with GR i.e. you could not have negative mass in our universe according to one of our most fundamental theories. This result, if confirmed, suggests that actually you can have negative mass in a way that is compatible with GR.

It is important to note that this does NOT mean that negative mass exists, only that, so far as we know, it could exist. All it means is that it is now another possible tool in the theorists arsenal to explain experimental observations without rewriting GR. However if I were to apply Occam's Razor to this discovery then I would argue that if something is allowed by GR we would expect it to be possible to produce because otherwise you need some additional mechanism beyond GR to prevent it from existing. Hence the simpler model is one where negative mass can exist...not that this means that it does. We are talking theoretical possibilities here, not experimental observations.

Yes they are wrong and it is easy to prove: just accelerate an electron to a high speed and the prediction of Newton will vary widely from that of Einstein. Hence Newton's laws are wrong as a fundamental model of the universe. As you say the aim of science is to come up with a mathematical model that predicts the behaviour of a system and under those precise criteria Newton is wrong and his model was most definitely proven wrong.

The absolute truth that scientific laws are trying to describe is "what will happen if we do X". In this sense they absolutely can be wrong. Newton's laws most definitely DO NOT work 100% even in the realm to which they are applied. They work 99.99...% which is usually "good enough" for most things but not always e.g. GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks, police radar guns etc.

However if you used relativity it would always be right for any situation we have managed to encounter or create. The only reason not to do so is that the maths is more complex hence we use laws we know to be wrong as approximations to our best understanding of the truth. Indeed we do this a lot in physics the only difference is that at one point we did not realize that Newton's laws were an approximation.

Ultimately it remains to be seen whether any scientific law we come up with can actually be "right" and I suspect that we will never really know even if we do come up with a perfect model to describe the universe. But we definitely can know when we come up with a wrong one.

Agreed - there is no reason to require the program be written in perl.