Yes, definitely Not News. When I went off to investigate grad school (in astrophysics) 25 years ago, departments I was applying too explicity warned me "look, odds that you'll get a long-term job in the field are slim if you go down this path". That's academics warning away potential customers of their grad programs: so the problem was bad enough even them for ethics to trump self interest.

This! In spades (and, this was exactly what those people telling me there were few jobs said next). It happened to work out for me (sort of, I do experimental particle physics now instead of real astrophysics).

But even my friends who didn't get as lucky as I did aren't unemployed or flipping burgers. If you can get a PhD in astro- or particle physics, you've got some useful skills that transfer nicely to working in the real world. Most all of which pay way better than being an academic. So again, my career works only because I love it: not because I wanted to get rich.

The WRX? That's the rally car version with an amazing power/weight ratio and all wheel drive to get that power to the rubber. Not exactly the Oldsmobile demographic.

FWIW, heated seats match up well with all wheel drive, you're living in a snowy place if you buy this car, regardless of age.

On the contrary, it's a well thought out experiment using some clever and not terribly expensive techniques. The "holographic universe" thing is a flashy attention grabbing headline, but if you bothered to go read up on the details, you'd see that it's simply a good way to look at the consistency of spacetime on scales people haven't yet explored. I, for one, would love to know if spacetime is lumpier than expected, regardless of what you care to call it.

Also, last week's "hints beyond the standard model" article was slashdot clickbait, not actual science news.

So, worthy reader, "how about doing some actual article reading, like the guys on Slashdot do?" Oh, wait, I see....

I'm a bit biased, but consider finding non-zero neutrino mass (via neutrino oscillations) as the first "beyond the standard model" evidence. Slashdot carried that story in its infancy, way back in 1998.

Also worth pointing out that TFA is talking about an experiment in construction that hopes to push the g-2 result past 5 sigma. It's not there yet, although 4.something sigma is still pretty darn good. Just 14 years late to the party.

I've been wondering how come there's not a diesel hybrid. Get the diesel goodness on the highway, the electric bonus in the city: make use of both strengths! Not like locomotives haven't been doing this for the last hundred years or anything...

Of course, I also wonder how come pneumatic hybrids aren't being developed more (I think Citroen is the only one out there). Storing energy as compressed air is more efficient than in batteries (which don't deal well with with high inrush currents), and don't have the "nasty chemical battery pack" issues.

I wasn't saying that: just that we've got a reasonable window into the thermal budget of the Earth at the present time. Looking back in the thread, that's what you opened up being worried about.

When the Borexino experiment was being built (under the Appenines in Italy), they calculated that if a nuclear sub parked for more than a couple weeks in the same spot in the Adriatic, they'd be able to see it using neutrinos.

Not sure if anyone's redone that calculation now that the experiment works, but the preliminary one attracted some interest from the defense side of things.

There is a reasonably well thought out set of specs for "if DoD wants to use neutrino detectors to monitor nuke activity in, say North Korea, what would they have to build". Done from the perspective of the particle physics guys saying "if we can get DoD to spend some of its semi-infinite pile of cash on some neutrino detectors we're interested in, how would we do it?". The answer turns out to be almost feasible, actually. Here's only the most recent paper I bumped across, there are many others.

How about "scientists have a pretty good idea". Here's a recent review article on geoneutrinos, which does compare direct neutrino observations and the overall heat budget.

Don't know everything, but the more tools you can turn on the problem, the more clear things become. Adds up to something a bit more than "squat".

Sure we do. We haven't yet seen neutrinos from each step of the process (still need to confirm the small fraction of CNO process), but all the other ones have been found. The sun works as advertised (to something a bit less than the 10% error level).

While this would result in graduates who really knew their stuff, I'm afraid the pressure is in the opposite direction. Administrators lean on faculty to increase the institution's "4-year graduation rate". Because legislators lean on them, because the public leans on the legislators. John Q. Public wants what he's paying for, a four year degree in four years, dammit! (despite the fact that an Engineering curriculum really is five years worth of stuff: it used to be here, and still is in much of the world). Given the current huge tuition rates, certainly that's understandable though: if penny wise and pound foolish.

Some people can learn what they need in less time than others. Some subjects are harder than others. But, everyone and every subject unfortunately has to be mashed into the same timeframe.

Of course, why it's ok for the "professional" careers (as if Engineer or Scientist isn't) you mention to require more schooling is a baffling exception. Good for those fields: they get the time to teach stuff thoroughly!

It does, we call those clumps "galaxies".

Note that the virtue of interacting only a little bit with normal stuff (via only the weak and gravitational forces, not gravity alone) actually makes it harder for dark matter to pack in tightly. Why? it's hard for a distribution of dark matter particles to shed kinetic energy and settle down more deeply into the gravitational potential well. Ordinary matter has all sorts of electromagnetic ways to shed energy and cool down.

If this thermal argument is opaque, imagine one WIMP, with some kinetic energy. It falls down towards the center of a galaxy. But, it seldom interacts to lose any energy, so zooms right back out the other side. Sort of a tiny, frictionless pendulum with a galaxy sized amplitude.

Why don't they just site their centers up north? Here in Duluth, most of the year the outside air is cooled for free by mother nature. Heck, they could sell their waste heat to nearby homes and businesses and get a negative PUE.

Don't need to be green to worry about this, it's $$, something ever company wants.

Sure, in principle.

However, a thorny engineering problem would be stopping the tons of antimatter holding up the platform from interacting with the normal matter around it. If it did, *boom*. That's the way you can get 100% of the "E" out of the "m" in E=mc^2.

Because we've watched them blow up nukes on seismographs?

Not that this wasn't posturing too: but it's pretty cut and dried, unlike Iraq where everyone simply figured there was no way they didn't have them.

Heh - I always considered "up2date" to be the original awful college laptop pandering move, and rejoiced when yum got capable enough to replace it. yum+rpm does a pretty good job of package management. yum's scripted and configurable. up2date relied on users having a throbbing blinky thing on their desktop and taking action in a way which was spookily similar to Windows Update, plus it had a bad habit of taking all your memory and CPU in the process.

On the other hand, I cannot agree with you more about this. Unfortunately, this happened long enough ago that Network Manager has since also infected RHEL and derivative server distros, which is even sillier. Step #1 on server installs for me is to rip it out by the roots, something which solves many problems (and should be the default install).