Comment soviet russia (Score 2) 561
In Soviet Russia the nuclear reactor Hey Easy's you.
Comment Re:time dilation (Score 1) 366
Drive away for 12 hours. Stop. Turn around Return to start point. 1.5 ns.
Comment time dilation (Score 1) 366
If you spend 24 hrs driving at 125 mph you will experience a time dilation of 1.5 ns.
Comment Re:My only question... (Score 1) 937
Actually octane (the main component of gasoline) is a small portion of crude oil. Most of the worlds octane comes from cracking heavier fuels and oils. If we didn't have to crack the heavy oils there would be more available for asphalt and lubricants. And we could crack the lighter fuels like octane and heptane to make more 2 or 3 carbon molecules for making plastics, vinyls, propylenes...It all sounds like a great idea to me.....but I will believe it when I see a car actually run on thorium...... and we see an end to global terrorism so we won't have to worry about dirty bombs..... and we see governments warm to the idea of individuals having concentrated radioactive material in their possession...... and we see a plan to deal with the radioactive daughter products which have a combined half life of almost 8 years and the left over thorium which has a half life of billions of years......
Comment chuck (Score 1) 673
In Soviet Russia Chuck Norris raptures you.
Comment Re:The Brain (Score 1) 673
I'm on my couch.
Submission + - How Chrysler's Battery-Less Hybrid Minivan Works (greencarreports.com)
thecarchik writes: Chrysler announced Wednesday that it would partner with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to build and test prototypes of a different kind of hybrid vehicle , one that accumulates energy not in a battery pack but by compressing a gas hydraulically. The system in question, originally developed at the EPA labs, uses engine overrun torque to capture otherwise wasted energy, as do conventional hybrid-electric vehicles. The engine is Chrysler's standard 2.4-liter four-cylinder, the base engine in its minivan line. But rather than turning a generator, that torque powers a pump that uses hydraulic fluid to increase the pressure inside a 14.4-gallon tank of nitrogen gas, known as a high-pressure accumulator.
Submission + - Teleportation in time (physorg.com)
dumuzi writes: Physicists from the University of Queensland have a developed a procedure for entangling a qubit in time and "teleporting" it to the future. The process uses quantum entanglements in Minkowski space-time (the same sort of entanglements that lead to Hawking radiation). They say there is an important symmetric in the time entanglement and detection: If the first detector is switched on and off 15 mintues before t=0, then the second detector must be in the same spatial location (presumably from the frame of reference of the experimenters) and it must be switched on and off 15 minutes after t=0.
Comment Stamps not so smart. (Score 1, Funny) 69
I beat it to the first post. Take that stamp.
Comment discrimination (Score 1) 4
Perhaps he was fired for owning a Segway not for charging it. This may be a case of ginger discrimination, like "kick a Segway day".
Comment Re:Don't Hold Your Breath (Score 1) 105
INAEB (I'm not an expert, but...) Your battery discharged while e is high may discharge more energy (shiver at the thought), but can you actually do more with that energy? If that battery is in a flashlight it now has to work against a higher e value to emit photons, in the end you may well end up emitting the same number of photons with the same wavelength, resulting in the same net change in entropy as if you had used your batteries while e was still small.
Submission + - Precognition Threatens Google's Long Term Future (techcrunch.com)
Hugh Pickens writes: "Alex Rampell writes that the holy grail of advertising is Intent Generation with "the ability to show the perfect advertisement at the perfect time (precognition, like in Minority Report), something Facebook has a better chance of doing than anyone" and that Intent Generation is one of the greatest long term threats to the money-making parts of Google. Google makes almost all it's money from contextual ads that appear with Google's search results, and while the battle for search is over for now — Google won — Rampell writes that the battle for the underlying revenue is just heating up. "For Google's enemies, the best way of hurting the search goliath is not to build a better search engine, but rather to give people a reason to stop searching for a wide class of goods and services by preempting search on Google," writes Rampell. "Intent Generation catches people further up the funnel, before they search, and delivers them what they want, and gets them to purchase, before they start searching."""
Submission + - In THIS house... FTL fields and currents. Really! (scientificamerican.com)
fyngyrz writes: So you think of electrons like dominoes in a wire. Push on the one in the end, the others react one after another. Pretty vanilla physics. Further, because the electrons are moving, you get magnetic effects, radio, etc. Good stuff. So. What if you move all the "dominos" at once? Put your virtual hand on all of them, and push them over. They're not moving sequentially any longer. They move together. At any speed you can make them go. Well, that's what these researchers are doing — "pushing" all along a conductor at once, able to make a signal go — ready? — FTL. Fascinating stuff. And it may explain pulsars.
Submission + - Deformable Liquid Mirrors for Adaptive Optics (technologyreview.com)
eldavojohn writes: Want to make a great concave mirror for your telescope? Put a drop of mercury in a bowl and spin the bowl. The mercury will spread out to a concave reflective surface smoother than anything we can make with plain old glass right now. The key problem in this situation is that the bowl will always have to point straight up. MIT's Technology Review is analyzing a team's success in combating problems with bringing liquid mirrors into the practical applications of astronomy. To fight the gravity requirement, the team used a ferromagnetic liquid coated with a metal-like film and very strong magnetic fields to distort the surface of that liquid as they needed. But this introduces new non-linear problems of control when trying to sync up several of these mirrors similar to how traditional glass telescopes use multiple hexagon shaped mirrors mounted on actuators. The team has fought past so many of these problems plaguing liquid mirrors that they produced a proof of concept liquid mirror just five centimeters across with ninety-one actuators cycling at one Kilohertz and the ability to linearize the response of the liquid. And with that, liquid mirrors take a giant leap closer to practicality.
Submission + - US experiment hints at 'multiple God particles' (bbc.co.uk) 1
krou writes: Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should, in fact, be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges. Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.'
