Perhaps I should have been more clear. I think it's a bad unit to use, because it's being used to purposefully scare people. The large order of magnitude of the measured values is misleading. Saying 1 Trillion Becquerels makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is.

While it's not a good thing, using Becquerels is a convenient way to make something sound worse than it actually is. It's 27 Curies, which is about 0.18% of the activity of the sources they use for some gamma sterilization machines (which can be around 15000 Curies or 555,000,000,000,000 Bq). Now that is a scary amount of radiation.

Something something...Magnuson–Moss Act has nothing to do with being able to buy aftermarket parts. It's about warranties.

Some friends of mine did exactly this as a research project last year.They did some testing at NASA Langley using some of their low pressure testing facilities.

It should be possible in a few years for sure and it may even be possible now. That being said, it's quite possibly the least efficient way to do anything anywhere, especially so on Mars. The rotor blades have to be enormous in order to generate enough lift. They also made some assumptions about materials used that aren't realistic right now, 5 years from now, probably, but not right now.

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.