I would have hoped that they would have a cluster of Raspberry Pis to do this instead.

Lets assume your object sinks - the density of the object is greater than the density of water.

When the object is on the ship, the amount of water displaced will be dependent on the weight of the object.
When the object is under the water, the amount of water displaced will be dependent on the volume of the object.
Since the density of the object is greater than water, the volume of water displaced under the water is less than the volume of water displaced whilst above water

Therefore the water level will rise a teeny tiny amount.
However the water level will fall relative to the side of the ship because the ship will not displace quite so much

He has his wife to protect him from that sort of thing... :-)

Only if you have a DeLorean that is bigger on the inside.... calling The Doctor...

So where does this leave ITER, the European project. There's little point building a 500MW experiment if 5 of these babies will work and produce useable power.

...they could just have used Detroit

+1 Foundation reference

...would trade a certain amount of safety for freedom.

We want a level of policing that provides a reasonable level of security but does not compromise our lifestyle unless a large number of casualties would result. One or two events per year do not necessitate loss of liberties that affect everyone.

Decent yachts and Learjets don't come cheap

Dirt isn't a big problem, nor are the other materials.

The premise has been examined by Andy Weir in his fiction book "The Martian", which shows that you can survive on relatively little. I am making the assumption that he did his chemistry and biology homework whilst writing this :-)

Well, having Mars as New Israel would be one way of fixing the Middle East wars....

It would be easier to move the Palestinians there though, as there's less of them.

On the other hand, you could simply have a receiver on Mars, a transmitter on Earth and beam over whatever individual genome you want....

They probably thought Windows Nien was a group removing Microsoft operating systems from PCs..

Is that pork or Kevin related science?

The referendum was a binding vote because it was approved by the Queen and Parliament in the confusingly titled "The Scotland Act 1998 (Modification of Schedule 5) Order 2013"