What the fuck are you talking about "wooshed"? Why did you think it appropriate to introduce humour into a perfectly serious topic of discussion?

As for which paper, do try to keep up.

The goldfish-like attention span of the average Slashdotter is ... "pathetic" would be too-high praise. I check my mail most days for replies to posts, and things do carry on with a back and forth for up to a few weeks before the thread gets archived (any idea what the criteria are for that?). But that's still pretty pathetic : when I was on Compuserve (before it was destroyed by AOL) we had one thread beating down a rabid creationist running for about 5 years and exceed 100,000 posts.

Keep up on the submissions though. I get several through a year. I'd have to check if the one that I posted a couple of days ago has been taken up. (No: I don't have any idea how this "promote your submission" thing is meant to work. Why would I want the average Facebook retard to come here and lower the tone of the place even further.)

Looking at my record for this year : pending, accepted, accepted, declined, a, d, d, d, d, d ... obviously had a run of differing interests at the start of the year. Average is about two accepted stories per year, and I put in maybe 8-10 per year

As I understand it, the "mitochondrial Eve" or "population bottleneck" hypothesis is based on a statistical circumstance that could be satisfied by a population of 1000 for one generation, or 2000 for 2 generations, or 4000 for 4 generations). But unless you've heard differently, it has always had fairly wide error bands on it - ten percent or more - which has never taken it out of the range of effects of Toba. Unless you know better, or have some recent review articles. (I'm don't really make an effort to keep closely up to date on these tropical questions. I'm more interested in the things that were happening through Siberia and Central Asia ; WTF with these Denisovians, and where did the Inuit and Americans come from?)

You might find it surprising, but I do actually have a sense of humour. And as a professional in the oil industry, I have no doubt what so ever that by injecting gigatonnes per annum of carbon into is in the process of doing to the global temperatures for the next few hundreds of thousands of years (the experiment has happened often enough in the past that denying these changes is simply perverse). I just don't find the topic amusing.

You seem to have missed the point that the paper does not claim that the organic matter is not rotting ; it is putting the decrease in 9 month decomposition at around 40% in 2007. So all your wishful thinking about the areas turning into anoxic coal swamps is not relevant : the vegetation would decay, but it would just take a bit longer (a couple of decades, maybe a half-century) to decay. That is a negligible period of time compared to the other processes involved.

My main reason for being cautious about quantities of mushrooms that I ate form the wild would be my known-poor ability at identifying them. If I had a competent mycologist on hand (I did when I lived with my parents ; I don't know anyone at this end of the country, apart form the mycology lecturer in the Soil Science department, and he moved away years ago when the department closed), I'd indulge in a "fungus foray" whenever convenient. I missed an organised one this year through being out of the country ; maybe next year.

Scotland did get lower radiation doses than Norway, but not by a huge amount. The amount of potassium in the bedrock might be an issue I'd pay a little attention to as well, but compared to the risk of misidentifying a mushroom, I don't consider it a significant risk.

yes, the vaccinations will prevent death from rabies.

Vaccination will not prevent death if you're exposed to rabies. The treatment is what prevents death. Being vaccinated before exposure to the virus considerable improves the effectiveness of the treatment both by helping the immune system fight back more rapidly against the virus, and also by extending by to a day or two the time that you can go between exposure (bite) and starting the injections that comprise the treatment. It's still not a perfect solution - the last time I read the patient information leaflets they were warning of about a 5-10% mortality amongst vaccinated and fully treated patients - but it's a lot better than for the unvaccinated and treated (barely 50%) or the vaccinated and untreated 20-30%. Those figures are quite old though - nearly 15 years - so modern formulations and adjuvants may produce a better response.

On the other hand, the vaccine (plus treatment) is pretty much as effective against bite wounds as non-puncture wounds such as sprayed saliva.

I still don't have any intention of doing anything against a suspiciously aggressive dog anywhere in the world apart from backing away slowly and maybe throwing any convenient crippled schoolchildren at the dog to distract it's attention while I escape. (I carry an emergency dehydrated crippled blind schoolchild with me at all times against this very event ; just add water, wait a couple of hours, et voila - a distraction!)

Also, where did you find any large lake upstream the Pripyat River from it? Or did you confuse it with the Kiyv Reservoir?

I think you misunderstood me. What you name as the Pripyat reservoir is about 10km upstream from a larger lake (I can't see a name for it - but it extends almost to the outskirts of Kyiv) ; that larger lake is downstream with respect to the Pripyat lake. Looking at the satellite views, the 10-odd km between the two lakes running past the Chernobyl plant itself, are filled with meanders and oxbow lakes, which develop on very flat-lying river flood plains. (Then again, the 100 to 104m altitudes you mention, hundreds of km from the river mouth also tells you that the slope of the river's long profile is very shallow.) So there is very little difference in altitude between the lakes, unless someone has literally moved hundreds of thousands of tonnes of soil to artificially raise the bed of the lake above the level of the flood plain (eyeballing it at 5km long by 1km wide, to raise the level of the bottom of the lake 1m above general ground level would take 5million cubic metres of soil, around 8 million tonnes ; lots. I can see them building earthworks to contain the lake (at which point you'd need a pumping station to pump water in), but not raising the level of the ground. and once you raise the water level several metres above the local land surface, then the pressure of that weight of water will compress the underlying ground over a period of years, so that your lake bed remains below local ground level.

IF you managed to drain the lake, and get the ground surface to dry out, then yes, you could have a dust problem. But those are some pretty big "if"s. If you really wanted to keep the problem buried for a useful period of time - like 2 half lives of caesium-137 - then embanking the Pripyat river so that it kept the lake full naturally would probably be the most economical method. That wouldn't do anything about non-radioactive pollution in the lake, but that's not exactly a problem that's unique to the area. The industrial world is full of lakes that have been used as dumping grounds for all sorts of industrial waste.

I'm a geoscientist.

What were the cities Ã'Ã'Ã'ýÃ'à and Ã"¼ÃÃÃ'OE supposed to read?

Bryansk, Gomel and Kyiv.

There's a large national park in the heavily contaminated area on the Belarus side of the border. And that is the way the wind was blowing during the accident.

Obviously Walmart are running the schools.

I rather suspect that this may be true.

Hmm, didn't know that.

May consider subscribing. Will consider researching.

The only close competitor would be whatever almost extincted humanity about 80,000 years ago, reducing the African portion of the species to the equivalent of about 1000

It was most probably called Toba. It's a volcano in Indonesia. 72,000 years ago, it let off a fairly big eruption and damned near wiped out the human race.

There are quite substantial error bars on the "mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis.

it could take a long time for an intelligent species to spread through the galaxy,

To a geologist, it's negligible.

We've probably had control of fire for about a megayear. OK, we've gone through several species names in the time, but so what? In the first megayear after getting STL transport that averages 0.1c, we could fill the galaxy.

We've got gigayears in front of us. Tens of them, before starting to need more exotic technologies.

Of course there is a last option: aliens exist, have overcome lightspeed, but are for whatever reason uninterested in galactic colonization.

Third reason : the aliens do exist ; aren't incommoded by FTL (long lives, they do have FTL transport, if not necessarily travelling FTL, hibernate ; multiple possible reasons) ; but they don't want to talk to us.

[SOB! SNIFFLE!]

They are the same, everywhere in the Universe.

Not even Einstein would have claimed that.

I think that you need to go back and re-read your Einstein. In English translation if you desire. That is very exactly and explicitly what he does claim. The whole basis of relativity is that the laws of physics (particularly electrodynamics) are the same for all observers, in particular regardless of their state of motion.

The debatability of this claim is, of course, precisely why he wasn't awarded the Nobel for Relativity. He got it for Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, which most people have forgotten about, these decades.