Only about 10% of drugs that enter clinical trials end up getting approved. "effective in monkeys" != "effective in humans".

The only novel thing is that they're bringing a highly contagious patient on an airplane half way around the world. If you think that's no more risky than bringing an inert, freeze dried sample in a tightly sealed container, well, trust me, it is.

Of course, I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong. Unless the plane crashes. Or experiences mechanical problems and has to make an unplanned landing. Or any of lots of other things that could go wrong, does.

Unfortunately, even though you wouldn't have to supply propellant, you would still need to supply the energy to accelerate it. After accelerating for one year, your potato's kinetic energy is 1.8e12 Joules. That's a lot of energy. Initially you can stick a solar panel on it to power the drive, but once you're out of the inner solar system that won't work any more.

No, we didn't.

Prior to the first gulf war (the one in the early 90s), Iraq had a chemical weapons program. After the war, that was shut down and most of their stocks destroyed. When the inspectors came through after the second gulf war (the one in the early 2000s), they came across old shells on which they found residue of chemical weapons, indicating that a decade earlier they had once contained chemical weapons. They found no evidence that Iraq had actually restarted its chemical weapons program, or had any significant stock of chemical weapons.

If you claim they found anything more than that, please provide a citation.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Why? This post seems to imply that your entire career should be determined by your major in college. Thank goodness that isn't true. How many people really know what they want to do at age 20? Lots of people change fields several times over their careers.

The mercury released into the atmosphere by using an incandescent is more than what's released by using a CFL. Incandescents don't contain mercury, but coal does, and a lot of the world's electricity comes from burning coal. Then of course, if you recycle your CFLs instead of putting them in the garbage, that means even less mercury in the environment.

It would at least prevent another American company from challenging them. Presumably the eventual goal would be to get other countries to sign on too. Since it's likely to be several years before any actual mining takes place, there's still time to deal with that.

Seriously. If there is one thing most smart people have in common, it's that they are not in Mensa.

I went to an Ivy League college. I work in an elite university. There are two Nobel laureates on my floor. I spend my days surrounded by certifiably Very Smart People.

I don't know a single person who belongs to Mensa. Most of the people I know would laugh at the idea of joining Mensa. They don't need to join an organization to show off how smart they are. Everyone already knows they're smart. They don't need to join an organization to find other smart people. They spend their days surrounded by smart people, because they work in fields that require intelligence.

You only have one ISP, but you have tons of video streaming services to choose from. This bill is about protecting competition in that latter market, not the former one. It won't create new ISPs, but it means your existing ISP can't block or downgrade service from internet companies that haven't paid it enough, or that compete with its own in-house services.

Google is just an index to information that's on the web. If you object to something that's on the web, go after the person who put it there and demand they remove it. I could totally understand that. But instead of demanding it be removed, they're demanding that an unrelated party stop telling anyone, anywhere in the world, that it exists. That makes no sense to me.

Plug-in hybrids are hybrids. "We find that if we exclude many of the more recent models of hybrids from our analysis, the number of people buying hybrids isn't increasing."

Well duh...

But that's exactly the problem: it doesn't get us out of low earth orbit. Or rather, it gets precisely one ship out of low earth orbit, but the next one we send out will have to start all over from ground level. Sending anything from the earth's surface into space is incredibly expensive. As long as we have to rely on that, we will never be able to do more than a handful of one-off missions involving a handful of people.

I want to see humans colonizing space. I want to see permanent habitats where people live for years at a time. And not just a few people, but millions. Sending a few people to Mars doesn't get us closer to that. Developing asteroid mining facilities does get us closer.

Why is sending humans to Mars supposed to be such a great thing? It's incredibly expensive, incredibly dangerous, and doesn't accomplish much of anything useful. Once you've sent them, the next trip will be almost as expensive as the first one.

I'm much more interested in building up a meaningful, sustainable space program. That means building up an industrial base in space. We need to be able to manufacture things in space out of raw materials that were mined in space. That's the only way that human space travel will ever be economically sustainable. So that asteroid mission sounds like exactly the right approach to be taking.

Or maybe they're using exactly the types of communication we're steadily moving toward: fiber optics for long distances, lots of low power transmitters for short distances. If they've expanded beyond their home planet, interplanetary communication would probably use lasers, so very very highly directional. All of these signals would of course be digital, not analog.

Anyone in a distant star system listening for messages would hear absolutely nothing.

Even the simplest calculation shows how absurd that claim is. The U.S. population is a bit over 300 million. Let's say 200 million are "working age". 50 million being out of work would be an unemployment rate of 25%. Ok, some people "aren't working" because they don't want to work. Perhaps they're staying home raising their children, while their spouse supports them. Though I'd argue being a full time homemaker is "working", especially if you're caring for children.

In any case, his number is clearly nonsensical. It has nothing to do with actual unemployment, the sort he's arguing this would make worse.