Furthermore, the statement by the bioethicist in the article is false:

I'm not sure why anyone would put it that way, since no one is out there having abortions for the purpose of supplying stem cells, and it is very nearly criminally irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

And if a pregnant woman elects to end her fetus's life wouldn't it be unethical not to use that tragedy to do some good for someone?

Another comparable case is the awarding of the 1998 prize to Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the discovery of the muon neutrino when Reines had not been award the prize for the discovery of the electron neutrino. In that case, thankfully, Reines was finally given the prize in 1995.

I wrote a long vitriolic rant in response to this, and then rechecked your post and realized you were criticizing this position, not promoting it.

Which is at least a bit of a cautionary tale, that lazy people (hi) may well take you to be actually spreading the fear you are trying to prevent. Although since as near as I can tell people never actually listen to or read the words in any communication, but react purely to a few random emotional cues, there's probably nothing to be done about that.

This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.

You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.

You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:

Pfusion Pcontainment

That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.

Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.

Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.

You are correct to label your question naive :-)

The average ocean depth is about 4000 m, so the depth being looked at here (just under 2000 m) isn't typically in contact with rock at all. That is, if you demarcated the 2000 m depth line it would intersect very little ocean floor, and that just off the edges of continental shelves. These are pretty much the "mid-depths" we are talking about.

Furthermore, rock is both a) insulating (compared to water) and b) of relatively low heat capacity (compared to water).

Water has a heat capacity of about 4 kJ/kg*K, which is to day it takes 4 kJ to raise 1 kg of water 1 K in temperature. A typical rock (granite, say, although most others are similar) has a heat capacity of 0.8 kJ/kg*K, so rock is both less able to transport heat and less able to absorb heat than water.

Oceans are far more important to the heat balance of the Earth than the air is. Consider the scales. Earth has 5E18 kg of air, and 1.4E21 kg water, and water has 4 times the heat capacity of air, so the thermal mass of the oceans is about 1000 times greater than that of the air (I'm actually surprised it's not more than that, but I've confirmed the numbers from a couple of different sources.)

Given that AGW is adding about 1.6 W/m**2 to the Earth's heat budget, consider a typical square metre of ocean surface, below which is a water column 4000 m deep with a mass of 4E6 kg. That 1.6E-3 kJ/s*m**2 has the capacity to raise the temperature of that water column by 1.6E-3/4*4E6 = 1E-9 K/s. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize there are 3.14E7 s/year, so ocean warming, all else being equal, could be as much as 0.03 K/year, or 0.3 K/decade, or 3 K/century.

These are pretty appreciable numbers, and give a sense of the utility of precise ocean measurements as a way of getting at AGW, because we should be able to see a characteristic depth profile of temperature developing over time that would allow us to infer the additional radiative forcing very directly.

Am I alone in finding any of this news? I dropped out of academia almost 20 years ago (best decision I ever made, also one of the more difficult ones) and it was clear then to anyone who could do simple arithmetic that most of us (post-docs) wouldn't get faculty positions.

The calculation is simple: take the number of people your department graduated last year and subtract the number of faculty they hired. This is the number of graduates who won't get jobs.

Sure it's a first-order estimator, but first-order estimators are robust has hell and give results that are generally accurate enough for going on with. This one makes a few pretty good assumptions, particularly "Your department is typical" (this will typically be the case) and "Last year was typical" (also typically the case.)

The situation is made worse because the degree of specialization in academia is absurd. Departments are looking for people with experience in Left-handed Galambosian Transformation studies and if you've focused on Abidextrous Galambosian Transformation studies it simply isn't worth applying for the position, because there will be a dozen candidates with precisely the right qualifications. You won't even make the short list (I did a few times, but thankfully was never hired.)

So unless you happen by pure chance to graduate into a hyper-specialization that is enjoying a year or so of high demand at the moment of your graduation, you are out of luck. Nor can you predict what will be in demand when you graduate: academia is a fickle beast, and fields go in and out of fashion in less time than it takes for the typical PhD. So study what you love, because you love it. That way, and only that way, will you win.

TFS was actually doing pretty well until the last few sentences. What is being "telepored" are "quantum properties", which are nothing at all like classical properties and which are certainly unrelated to "objects".

The process is "quantum" in the sense that the information is hidden behind the quantum veil of the carrier wave. There is more to quantum phenomena than non-locality, although non-locality is one of the more spectacular ways it manifests.

Quantum "teleportation" happens to properties. Imagine you have a house of indeterminate colour, and a "colour teleporter" that consists of a beam of light between your house and another house a few miles away that will carry that colour of that house to your house. You turn the "teleporter" on, wait for the beam of light to establish itself, your confederate at the other end aims the "teleporter" at the first house, and your house becomes the colour of the first house at a time L/c later, where L is the distance the light has to travel and c is a well known constant.

This is a pretty close analogy to what is happening during "quantum teleportation"--and remember, if you stick you hand in the space the information is being "teleported" through you will get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary laser beam that is used to carrying the information.

To leap from this "colour teleoportation" to the claim that "scientists teleported a house from one neighbourhood to the next" would be clearly and egregiously false, yet that is what discussions of quantum "teleportation" always end up with: people talking as if photons, atoms, molecules and viruses are being carried through space and reconstructed at the other end.

To see how wrong this is, consider a case where there is actual teleportation vs quantum "teleportation" of an electron to the Moon. In the case of actual teleportation, an important quantum number changes: the count of electrons on the Moon. In the case of quantum "teleportation" the Moon's electron number stays exactly the same. So the two final quantum states are completely different in these two cases. The processes have nothing to do with each other and it is misleading and wrong to talk about them as if they do.

But weather is not climate, as we get reminded by Warmists every time there is a cold snap (they are mysteriously silent on this issue when there's a heat wave.)

Furthermore, predicting "the weather will be the same tomorrow as today" gets you about 70% accuracy (http://www.weatheranalytics.com/wa/weather-report-forecasts-improving-climate-gets-wilder/) so the increment to a shade over 80% at a cost of millions in hardware and enormous computational complexity is nothing to write home about.

Furthermore, this new report, if it withstands the test of time, is one more demonstration that anyone who says "the science is settled" is a political shill (likely for the far left: http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...)

Every few months we get an announcement of a new way in which climate models are wrong. For purely political reasons this is usually couched in terms of "worse" or "better" (usually worse, because that's what sells eyeballs) but to a scientist what matters is "correct" or "incorrect". The sign of the error is relatively uninteresting when evaluating the quality of the science.

And don't get me wrong: anthropogenic climate change is real and significant, and we should be aggressively pursuing changes. Carbon taxes, in particular, are an proven-effective policy that both reduce CO2 emissions and reduce income taxes and corporate taxes, so anyone who opposes them must be in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes.

And anyone who says both "ACC could result in the end of civilization" and "We should not be building new nuclear plants" is beyond evil. Nuclear power is a significant component of the climate change solution because it is the only generally-available, proven-effective replacement for base-load coal, and coal is a huge contributor to GHG emissions.

Those would be nerds, to whom this news matters.

The problem is not with the article, but the headline, which I agree is very misleading, although not as bad as those idiotic "Man does X using only HIS BRAIN"(and a few million dollars of heavy electronics that replace his arms and the keyboard.)

Quasi-particles are real particles. They are just composite particles that exist only inside atomic lattices instead of elementary particles that exist in free space. That someone has created a quasi-particle that is described by Majorana's equation is extremely interesting.

As well as the potential impact on climate change... no, wait, this discovery got "quantum computing" in the buzzword lottery... as well as the potential impact on quantum computing, this sort of discovery is interesting because it allows us to investigate the dynamics of Majorana particles empirically, and that can lead to unexpected and novel insights. Good science, that.

IIRC from Stroustrup, non-standardized name mangling is considered a feature because it acts as a public interface for many other non-standardized incompatibilities under the hood. Without it, it would be possible to link code emitted from different C++ compilers that would fail to interoperate properly in subtle and difficult-to-debug ways.

So it isn't quite fair to imply that if only name mangling were standardized the problem would go away: it would really require a very large enhancement to the standard that would deal with all the different ways that compilers do things now. That potentially involves a vast amount of work on understanding current compiler technology, much of which would likely be obsolete by the time the standard shipped. Ergo: compiler compatibility is unlikely to ever happen.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, just that it's a thing. I currently code in C, C++ and Python, and C++ is by far the most difficult, dangerous and awkward of the three (or of any language I've ever coded in, really) but the additional power does make it worthwhile in certain circumstances.

TFA says it has been used up to seven days in humans, so it's only a factor of ten or so to get a significant chuck of Mars transport out of the way.

In general, chemical reactions slow down with temperature, and while typical therapeutic hypothermia involves fairly high temperatures (~33 C) there may be room to reduce this considerably. Humans will never hibernate without a whole lot of physiological intervention, but it is far too early to say whether or not metabolic activity--including that of our commensal bacteria--can be reduced sufficiently to sustain a mission to Mars.

Maybe you're just from somewhere other than Europe, where a rabbit in the moon is the more common image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Nope. Pluto's designation is based on it's size, mostly. The category "planet", like all categories, is made by humans to conveniently describe the universe to ourselves, and the precise boundaries are constrained (but not determined) by how the universe actually is and how we actually are. Within those constraints we can put the boundary where we like, and in the case of planets, smaller bodies that don't dominate their gravitational neighbourhood have been deemed to fall outside the human-created category we use the word "planet" to label.

Quasi-moons are bodies in solar orbits that have interacted with their quasi-primary such that they are "station keeping" with it. A body like this one will wander around in the general vicinity of Earth as both Earth and quasi-moon travel around the sun together. So from the perspective of an observer on Earth, the quasi-moon executes periodic but non-orbital motion: it wanders in a closed configuration that does not describe a path that goes around the Earth.

This is, like many such distinctions, fairly arbitrary: the sun's gravity at the orbit of the Moon is a good deal stronger than the Earth's gravity at the orbit of the Moon, so one could describe the Moon as being in orbit about the sun, with it's orbit perturbed into a wobble by the nearby Earth. That is, from an outside observer's perspective, the Moon's motion is never retrograde with respect to it's mutual orbit with Earth around the sun.

Consider the view:

O o .

where the O is the sun, the o is the Earth and the . is the Moon. In the configuration shown (with the Moon on the outer wobble of its orbit about the Sun) it is moving faster than average (imagine the Earth and Moon both rotation clockwise around the Sun, and the Moon moving clock-wise around the Earth, so when in the image above it is moving "down" on the page).

But in the situation that obtains two weeks later:

O . o

where the Moon on the inner wobble of its orbit about the Sun, it is still moving "down" on the page relative to the Sun even though it is moving "up" on the page from the perspective of an observer on Earth.

Another way to see this is to consider that the Moon executes a wobble like this once a month, traveling 2*pi*0.25 million miles (lunar orbit is about 250 thousand miles), but at the same time moves 2*pi*96/12 million miles in its orbit around the Sun (which is 96 million miles from Earth), and since 96/12 > 0.25 it should be clear that the Moon's orbital velocity around the Sun is higher than it's orbital velocity around the Earth. Ergo: no retrograde motion for the Moon!

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying: how we classify Moons vs quasi-moons is useful, but--as with all the ways we as knowing subjects classify the objectively real universe we live in--somewhat arbitrary. We could--but don't, so far as I know--have a name for the class of moon-like objects that have orbital velocities around their primary that are greater than their orbital velocity around their primary's primary (most Earth-orbiting satellites fall into this category.) Instead, we have a name for objects that don't execute motions relative to their (quasi-)primary that look like a loop around it from the perspective of an observer on the primary's surface.

So they are the same as the 2nd Amendment, yes?

Let's be clear about this: widespread gun ownership in the US is held to be useful for two purposes:

1) empowering the people to overthrow a tyrannical government

2) personal protection.

The second of these is overwhelmingly what the gun lobby focuses on when selling guns to their "patriotic American" base.

The problem is: widespread firearms ownership is demonstrably, empirically, a terrible solution to the problem of personal protection. Firearms for personal protection--specifically handguns--are vastly more widespread in the US than in any other developed nation. The murder rate in the US is vastly higher than any other developed nation.

So anyone looking at the data would have to say that widespread handgun ownership is "a feel-good measure that accomplishes nothing". Anything else would be simply bizarre, a complete rejection of the data. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate).

Please note: I am not arguing that the 2nd Amendment doesn't protect American's right to keep and bear arms, including handguns, AR-15s, etc. I am arguing--pointing out, really--that a very significant proportion of advertising, promotion and rhetoric around gun ownership in the US is aimed at exactly the kind of feel-good emotionalism that gun owners frequently complain about with regard to people who promote solutions to the problem of personal protection that have actually worked everywhere else in the developed world.

The 2nd Amendment and other features of the uniquely broken American political system prevents those solutions--gun control and the rule of law--from being applied in the US, but to pretend that is anything other than a tragedy that is indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents every year is laughable.

Better solutions than guns exist to the problem of personal protection. Only in America are those solutions incapable of being implemented.

It doesn't really matter how the accounting is done, utilities are going to have to charge more for power as they sell less of it, because their fixed costs are such a large proportion of their total costs. Fixed costs account for anywhere from 75 to 100% of plant costs: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/c... (the data in table 1 appear to mean "fuel cost" when they say "variable cost").

The utilities model is based on the notion that you can recover your capital costs (and more) over the lifetime of the plant. The rapid rise of solar in particular is putting that at risk, and utilities are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can fight by keeping power costs low, and lose, or they can fight by raising their power costs--however they want to do the accounting--and also lose.

Personally, I hope they raise the costs. It will make low-carbon alternatives like wind and solar more attractive.