It sounds though as if he can stack the layers and, if you can stack enough you can still get quite a large total voltage across all of them even if you only have a tiny voltage across each individual layer: think capacitors in series.

No that was the first line of the actual article I quoted, the one you linked to. What I am still failing to understand is why this is in any way shape or form a "Breakthrough". Setting a new record holding time is not a breakthrough unless it passes some critical threshold or overcomes some previously known limit. If it is just a new record then it is just an incremental improvement, not a breakthrough. Similarly a slightly better way of measuring plasma is an incremental improvement not a breakthrough.

I asked /. because I saw no evidence of a "breakthrough" in the article, just minor incremental improvements but since plasma physics is not my field I felt it more appropriate to take the "does anyone see how this is a breakthrough" approach in case I had missed something instead of "this is clearly over-hyped and it is just incremental"....I am forming the strong opinion now though that I did not miss anything, that there is no "breakthrough" only incremental improvements and that this article is just massively overhyped.

MOND may not technically be dead but we can definitely call it undead. Like any good Dracula sequel the original theory has been well and truly staked through the heart by the evidence but along comes some hapless theorist with something even more improbable but not actually excluded by data idea and once again the corpse lumbers to life as a pale immitation of its former glory before once again having another data-driven stake through the heart.

As we all know the sequels are almost never better than the original but as long as we have hapless theorists willing to breathe life once again into the slumbering corpse of MOND then yes, technically you are correct but we are now at the stage where none but a few diehard fans really care anymore.

It's not really a counter example since crazy theories like MOND never really die at least not until their strongest proponents do so Betteridge technically holds. MOND has clearly been at least undead though for a while but will likely remain in that state for quite a few years more until we actually get the answer.

That's certainly one hypothesis but I woud hardly define it as "probably correct". WIMPs are definitely still very much a possibility and, I would argue just as likely especially with the discovery of the Higgs that could lower the cross-sections further without requiring any new particles other than DM itself. The other intriguing possibility is that DM is made up of primordial black holes. LIGO is rapidly exploring this hypothesis and I believe cosmologists could not explain where they came from if they are found in the remaining areas of phase space bur the aluring thing about this explanation is that it requires nothing new in terms of particles.

That's exactly what a gravitational wave is: a bend in space-time that propagates.

No, quantum fluctuations like that lead to Dark Energy, essentially the energy of free space and we _REALLY_ do not understand that: if you do the calculations based on what we think we know so far you end up with a cosmological constant over 100 orders of magnitude away from what appears to be the value in our universe.

It only turns into any sort of war when someone actually does something.

One of the problems with nuclear reactors is that large scale ones have more significant heat disipation problems. This is why they have to be located near highly reliable water sources like major rivers, lakes and oceans. It's your size argument in reverse: smaller reactors will avoid some problems that larger reactors have. Now, whether that is enough to offset the increase in costs you outline I do not know but I do not think it is quite as obvious as you think, especially when you factor in environmental costs to not having controllable carbon-free power to backstop your renewables.

Really so what part of "Researchers ....measured a new record for a fusion device internally clad in tungsten" -literally the first sentence of the article that you claimed to have read suggests that the record breakthrough being claimed has anything to do with a measuring device? The only way I can read that is that the record is about holding plasma for a long time in a tungsten vessel and I do not understand why this is such a major breakthrough.

You might want to try reading the article yourself - at least as far as the first sentence!

So do they understand why this works? I had always understood the challenge with Tokamaks was keeping the plasma away from the walls because otherwise it picks up heavy ions from the wall that radiate the heat away rapidly cooling it and stopping it fusing. How does putting a wall of tungsten help that? If the only problem is that the plasma gets hot enough to melt the walls then put in some cooling - afterall that is going to be needed to extract the heat to generate power in a real reactor.

If all they have done is put in some heat shielding so they can run the reactor hotter then how is this a "breakthrough"? the article seems very lacking in details to actually explain why this is an important breakthrough given that we already knew tungsten could handle heat well.

You can also check out Aurora Watch which uses a magnetometer array to predict the likelihood of aurora - you can even sign up for email alerts. It's based in Alberta and currently they are predicting an 89% chance of aurora tonight.

Regardless of whether or not they are coming putting tariffs on them makes this a trade war not a cold war.

I see you are an advocate of the Boeing school of safety. I'm not entirely sure that always works well, while you can over do it sometimes expensive safety equipment has to be mandated.

Ok, Alberta where growing barley will benefit. It's a long way west from Upper Canada - which incidentally was well south of the permafrost line - but it is Canada. Indeed, in general the climate predictions for much of Alberta are milder winters and cooler wetter summers which I would definitely argue is a nicer climate....but then I am British so your mileage may vary.

Of course the problem is that when you mention this the climate activists go nuts (the university in the article got a lot of pushback when it was published) but inevitably it is clearly going to be true. Any time you change the climate some places will get nicer climates and some will get worse and it is stupid to think otherwise. That does not in any way undermine the argument against climate change - the transition of farming and people will incur immense cost, disruption and suffering - but it does make the argument more honest.

No because you paid them money for the game which covers the cost. If they think that the continued support for the authentication server is too much then they just need to issue a patch for the game that removes the need to authenticate.

At the very minimum, if they are going to effectively add an expiry date to the game then, just like any other product with an expiry date, it has to be clearly advertized on the box at time of purchase to customers know that they are only going to get 5 years of access. Of course that will hurt sales but whether a game has an expiry date is entirely up to them and if they insist on having one they should be required to state it.