I think Bruce must have forgotten the rules. Bruce, will you remind Bruce of the rules? All right then Bruce.

Rule 1: No Poofters!
Rule 2: No member of the faculty is to mistreat the Abos in any way at all, if there's anybody watching.
Rule 3: No Poofters!
Rule 4: This term I don't want to catch anybody not drinking.
Rule 5: No Poofters!
Rule 6: There is NOOOOOOOOO Rule 6!
Rule 7: No Poofters!

Well there you go Bruce, them's the rules here in the philosophy department of the University of Wooloomooloo.

Ah, but core temperature isn't what we're interested in here. We're interested in the surface temperature. What are the dynamics of a star's atmosphere - of the outer layers of gas not participating in nuclear fusion? Well, there's gas pressure which tends to make the atmosphere expand and cool, and gravity which tends to make the atmosphere contract and heat up. As the atmosphere expands and cools, gas pressure decreases, and as the atmosphere contracts and warms, thermal pressure increases, and eventually an equilibrium is struck where the gas pressure outwards equals the gravitational force inwards.

The core heat source is actually secondary to this. More massive stars are hotter because they are more massive - the sheer mass of gas that collapsed from a nebula to form such a star provides huge amounts of energy by gravitational accretion. Then, because of being so hot to begin with, they burn fuel faster than their smaller, cooler cousins, and that keeps them hot.

So the largest stars are the ones where the equilibrium is found at a point where the atmosphere is large, sparse and cool, and hence red. This isn't such a star. In a super-hot star like this the radiation pressure comes to predominate over gas pressure, and that has a tendency to blow any surrounding gas clean away. It's too heavy, and, as you say, too hot, and very unstable. So it can't form a well-behaved convective envelope around itself and become a red hypergiant. It remains a very massive, very hot, and very luminous star, but it never troubles the list of the largest stars known.

One thing the article didn't mention was the radius of the new star. It's obviously larger than the sun, but is it the "largest" star found or simply the most massive? It seems with that kind of mass it might be denser than your average supergiant and have less volume, and therefore less radius.

It's blue, therefore it's hot, therefore it's dense, therefore it's (comparatively) small. VY Canis Majoris would be much larger, even if not so massive - and cooler, and therefore red. Indeed, notice the diagram in the article, showing this star as compared to the Sun. The Sun is visible on the diagram. This would not be the case with VY Canis Majoris!

It's all gas law really, just like in high school physics. pV = nRT. When a star contracts, it heats up; when it expands, it cools. As a supergiant's core switches on and off as it works its thermonuclear way up the periodic table, it may inflate and deflate over and over again.

None of them have any credibility left, and will never get it back until they condemn instead of defend "Mike's Nature trick".

Just to be sure you're not a crank: could you explain to us what "Mike's Nature trick" was, what was in "decline" and how it was hidden? I mean, you're not just regurgitating memes from denialist blogs, right? You do actually know what you're talking about, right?

i have been saying this for quite some time but hasn't anyone paid attention to the fact that hydrocarbons produce more water than carbon dioxide?

Our production of water vapour isn't all that big an issue. There's a given amount of water vapour that can exist in the air, which depends on local pressure and temperature. If for some reason there's too much around, it rains or forms dew. If there's too little around, water on the ground evaporates until equilibrium. There's already a huge amount of water available, so if the Earth's atmosphere was capable of taking up significantly more water vapour, it would have a source from which to take it, human industry or no. On the largest scale, then, we're not adding water vapour to the atmosphere, where it would affect the greenhouse effect very significantly; we're adding liquid water to the ocean, where it makes very little difference at all.

Carbon dioxide on the other hand is a trace gas in the Earth's atmosphere. While the industrial output of water won't affect the ocean noticeably, our output of carbon dioxide has very definitely increased the concentration of that gas in the atmosphere. Will the plants not absorb it? Possibly; carbon dioxide is good for plant life. But the exchange is much slower here. Water rains out to the ocean in an hour or two, but a great tree takes decades to grow and absorb a comparable mass of carbon. And the proportions are very different. Estimates are that we've added something like 35% to the pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide; that would be fine if the plant biomass increased by the same proportion, so that our additional carbon was locked up in the form of wood rather than loose in the air. 35% increase in plant biomass is a lot to ask. Especially when you're busy bulldozing rainforests for cattle grazing.

Think wearables. Batteries are heavy and inefficient and need periodic access to a power supply to recharge; that limits how long you can go on using your various toys, especially if you're way out in the wilderness on some mission or other. If you can draw power directly from the wearer's body, then you can greatly improve the usefulness of his electronic augmentations.

NPR membership: what's that?
Birth control pill: wrong gender.
Non-pharma drug provider: is this a euphemism for weed and stuff?
Car insurance: I don't need to drive, I go to work on a bicycle and I pay for public transport as I use it - I'm not on often enough for a season pass to be worthwhile.
Gym membership: isn't that where people drive for half an hour to get there, spend an hour on an exercise bike, then drive for half an hour to go home again?
Health insurance: well, nice to have, but hardly an essential.

Which brings it down to a choice between home and mobile internet. Home internet's far faster, but I could more easily copy with having only 3G internet connectivity and no cable than I could cope with having cable internet and no mobile phone. So I voted for the mobile.

There is also a huge wall inside the DMZ, separating the two Koreas. SK says their isn't, but it is clearly visible from the North.

Are you going to link us to a satellite image of this wall, or are Google in on the conspiracy too?

I've been reading the odd scraps of information coming out about Taranis for a few years now. Supposedly it was supposed to begin flight trials in 2010; has this happened yet, or have they just shown off the prototype model on the ground to a few media hacks?

There was an interesting conspiracy theory put about a while back that Taranis was only incidentally a scary UAV project - that its real purpose was technology laundering. BAE have had access to American stealth technology through the JSF project; Taranis is a stealth aircraft supposedly developed independently. So if ten years from now BAE start selling stealth drones to every sheikh with a few billion quid in his trousers, they'll say 'oh, this technology is derived from the Taranis project. Nothing to do with the American secrets we were shown while working on the F-35, no, not at all...'

closed, locked down and heavily restricted devices

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Debian 3:1.10.2.legal-1osso30+0m5) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

~ $ sudo gainroot
Root shell enabled.

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Debian 3:1.10.2.legal-1osso30+0m5) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/home/user #

It like admitting that communism can't produce enough rope, only capitalism can, but they need rope so they deal with capitalists.

Read 1984 closely enough and you'll see this in effect. The despairing ending which everybody remembers is the future imagined as a boot stamping on a human face forever. But what was the first example we saw of the Party's information control in action? Why, it was our hero Winston Smith editing the figures for boot production.

For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

Keep stamping, Big Brother. The day's coming soon when you'll run out of boots.

Not to mention that whenever you leveled up, everything else in the game mysteriously leveled up as well, in a way that was so painfully obvious it totally broke my suspension of disbelief. When the wolves mysteriously turned into timber wolves I realized leveling was pointless.

Sounds a lot like Dragon Age. Every monster levels along with you; advance your skills enough and it tells you their level on the mini-map. Every single mook in the room, all the same level, all one level below you.

Massively pissed me off, because it takes away all the 'omg cool now I kick ass!' reward of levelling up. I don't mind the monsters scaling up to harder kinds of monsters; as I levelled up further in Fallout 3 I randomly encountered yao-guai and deathclaws more and more often and that was fine. And I don't mind the game scaling the difficulty up by throwing monsters at me in greater numbers; I feel really good about levelling up when I massacre dozens of a monster type that used to give me a hard time one on one. But I can't accept that the exact same goons I was slaughtering back at the start of the game have all uniformly levelled up alongside me.

4% sure does seem significant. But more interesting is that the measurement is thought to be much more precise because of the method of measurement. Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?

Maybe, but this is still surprising. Measure a grape with a metre rule, you should still be able to say 'it's between a centimetre and a centimetre and a half.' Measure it with a micrometer, and you'd expect to see a result like 'It's 1.2144 centimetres.' If the micrometer instead measured the grape at 0.7218 centimetres, well, you'd be puzzled. First of all, of course, you'd check you were doing it right. You'd examine your micrometer and make sure you were operating it correctly. You'd recheck how you measured it with the metre rule - is it zero from where the number is printed, or from the edge of the ruler, is the ruler maybe worn down at the edge?

But if all that checked out and you still had this discrepancy, you'd start to wonder if your ruler and your micrometer were really measuring the same units.

Hence the suggestion of new physics. Theoretically the muon should act like a heavy electron - interacting with the proton in just the same way, so that it can be used as a more precise probe on the size of the proton. It would be the micrometer to the electron's metre rule. If it doesn't - if the muon interacts with the proton in some unexpected way so as to throw the measure off - then we've discovered something beyond the standard model.

There are quite a few indications that there is physics beyond the standard model - heavy neutrinos, the abundance of matter over antimatter, the dark matter - and so if we can add this to the list then maybe it can help pin down just what sort of a new theory we're looking for. We've got to have something to do once the good people of Geneva finally hammer us out a Higgs, after all :-)

Google doesn't use the hella prefix consistently. Example:

1 hellagram = 1.0 × 10**27 grams

1 hellabyte = 1.23794004 × 10**27 bytes

Shouldn't that last one be a hebibyte or something?

I guess I could use them for children's birthday parties huh?? Just hope some little girl doesn't think she's cute and rubs it in her hair to make it staticy and BOOM!!!

You've heard, I suppose, the story of George, who played with a Dangerous Toy, and suffered a Catastrophe of considerable Dimensions?