You definitely weren't hearing sonic booms from a B-52! It's max speed is 650 mph which is a whopping .85 Mach.

That being said, B-52s are really loud and their engines do have a very distinct scream.

To me it depends on what the aircraft is doing, who is operating it and so what the intention of the owner/operator is.

UAV's and R/C planes both come in all shapes and sizes, so that doesn't have anything to do with it. The whole "all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles," thing.

I'm a senior in aerospace engineering and our capstone project is to spend the year designing and then building a UAV for the US Coast Guard to be used in a variety of situations: search and rescue ops, patrolling harbors, monitoring coastal erosion, monitoring buoys, etc... Now, remove the intentions that the USCG has for the UAV and you just have a large R/C plane with a camera that points down and an off-the-shelf autopilot. Plenty of hobbyists use the same autopilot and camera hardware that we are using.

This is why you keep receipts and copies of any paperwork for something like this.

A similar technology is a significant portion of the reason why my father is alive today.

They're called SIR Spheres and they can be used to carry chemotherapy drugs or a radioactive isotope.

In my fathers case, they used Yttrium-90 to treat the cancer that originated in his gall bladder and had spread into his liver. They allow for a very directed method for delivery of the chemo or radiation.

Some physics grad students that I know use Mathematica for note taking in their physics classes. I haven't used it myself, but apparently it has decent shortcuts for notation.

I've just recently begun to get involved in academic research and I've been amazed at how expensive things are. New manual spin coater? 3k. Want a better one? 5-8k.

Bearings in a turbomolecular pump go bad? 3k to repair, unless your boss lets them have it when said pump has less than 1000 hours on it and they decide pissing off a department that they make a lot of money from isn't smart. Same pump brand new is 10k.

Helium leak detector goes tits-up? 4.5k to repair. Of course that's better than buying a new one!

Let's not forget the 3.5k balance. Of course it's "accurate" to 0.00001g or some similar nonsense.

Completely insane.

Edison probably stole the recording in the first place, much like he stole many other ideas and "IP".

No it didn't. The timeline starts after the series. It seems likely that River was caught at some point after Objects in Space and the beginning of Serenity shows them rescuing her.

He's my hero, does that count? (I'm 31 though).

For a slightly younger person, perhaps Garrett Lisi? He's older than what #2 seems to require, but he's still quite young at 42 and is doing some interesting work. He's also a surf bum :D

My father gave me his slide rule when I transferred to uni. I wonder what my profs would say if I busted it out during an exam. :D

http://www.setileague.org/ has loads of info on horns that can be built or bought.

Ironically, in the area of Louisiana I lived in the parochial schools were the best schools in the area. They also only taught actual science in science class. They kept religious things in classes about religion.

I had non-christian friends who sent their children to the private parochial schools in the area because the education there was so much better. I'm not sure if their children were forced to stomach the classes on loving Geebus though.

Having lived in Louisiana this doesn't surprise me at all. You couldn't go a quarter-mile in most areas without seeing a church.

I'd swear they've had this option for ages. It was just buried in a non-obvious place.

Hmm maybe, but I'm thinking more Barry White.