You forgot the thermal radiation asymmetry. Don't worry; you're in good company.

Watch the replay of his lecture and you'll see a lot more. I was lucky enough to be there; very impressive work.

I was going to suggest "Reclaim" or "Recycle".

Are you sure about that?

Can we send 546 instead?

You know; I've started to wonder if we're too hard on the sounds in space issue. A close passing ship? I actually could see that as causing noise.. after all, the people inside are not in a vacuum. Did the Apollo astronauts hear their engines firing? A close passing ship could cause a vibration in your ship's hull (caused by the impact of whatever material is leaving their engines or some other mechanism), which generates sound in the ears of the people inside, carried through the internal atmosphere. If we go more science fiction, a "warp drive" type system could cause bending/vibration in the hull of our or a nearby ship too. Why wouldn't we hear our own ship or a ship passing by in space?

Just some speculation.. until I get there myself, it's hard to say just what I'll hear.

Do you say that because it's popular to brand the LDS religion as crazy, or do you have a specific reason to believe so? Come talk with us about what we really believe; you might be surprised. Oh, you may encounter a couple people who might encourage you to convert, maybe even the over-zealous member who says you have to convert, but you don't. It's still your choice, all the way through.

If you really don't want to risk talking to one, this page may be helpful, at least in terms of the ideas currently popular to point at.

(emphasis added)

Can we all stop applying single data points to a broad culture? In no way is this inclusive of Mormonism either, nor to religion as a whole. Some people who ascribe themselves as Mormons or any other religion, perhaps, but not to religion (including the LDS faith) itself.

I know I may be a little late to the conversation here, but:

From Mormonism-101

Do Latter-day Saints believe that they will “get their own planet”?
No. This idea is not taught in Latter-day Saint scripture, nor is it a doctrine of the Church. This misunderstanding stems from speculative comments unreflective of scriptural doctrine. Mormons believe that we are all sons and daughters of God and that all of us have the potential to grow during and after this life to become like our Heavenly Father (see Romans 8:16-17). The Church does not and has never purported to fully understand the specifics of Christ’s statement that “in my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2).

In other words, when all you have are economists... everything looks like a market.

Perhaps our real problem is that everyone has become too specialized; they see the world from their point of view and can't understand how the world can look different to someone else. If we really want to get serious about solving society's problems, then we need society to do the solving. Societies are made up of politicians, scientists, economists, mechanics, teachers, clergy, merchants, even homeless people and kids. A real solution to climate change requires everyone, so that a proposed solution can be weighed for its benefits from all perspectives.

I'd be all for electing people who take the time to actually learn some science and manual labor skills in addition to (not instead of!) history, law, and economics.

You say that as though it's novel... and as though the current administration was responsible for the project going through.

The US has been at Mars for a long time-- and the project that became Curiosity was started in 2004.

Let's look at all of the (successful) trips we've taken to Mars in the US:

Mariner 4 1965 Johnson (D)
Mariner 6 1969 Nixon (R)
Mariner 7 1969 Nixon (R)
Mariner 9 1971 Nixon (R) First Orbital Insertion
Viking 1 1976 Ford (R) First US Landing on Surface
Viking 2 1976 Ford (R)
Mars Global Surveyor 1997 Clinton (D)
Mars Pathfinder 1997 Clinton (D)
Mars Odyssey 2001 Bush (R)
MER-A (Spirit) 2004 Bush (R)
MER-B (Opportunity) 2004 Bush (R)
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 2006 Bush (R)
Pheonix 2008 Bush (R)
Dawn 2009 Obama (D)
MSL (Curiosity) 2012 Obama (D)

Looking at that list there seem to be a lot of R's.... but then again, many of these projects were started well before whoever happened to be in office was there when they arrived at Mars.

Don't get me wrong; Curiosity is an incredible achievement, and I'm really excited about its success, as well as hopeful for the new project just announced. But it does bug me that a lot of people are treating it as though it's a once-in-a-generation achievement, akin to Armstrong walking on the moon. Fact is, we've been at Mars for a long time. Fact is, both Democrats and Republicans have been around while we've been doing it.

I got a big kick out of our current President's science adviser speaking at the landing-- I stayed up to watch the whole thing. He said something to the effect of "No other nation has ever been to Mars; no other nation has ever been to another planet." I remember distinctly, because I was drinking a glass of water at the time, and ended up with half of it on me as I choked. The next morning, all of the news articles I had looked up to verify that Holdren had indeed said this had conveniently changed the quote to something completely different, showing that somebody pointed out that he had just made a big error.

Fact: the Russians were the first to land on Mars. Fact: the Russians have also been quite successful with landings on Venus. Fact: the ESA, JAXA and the UK have all been working on projects to Mars. Mars Express is a successful ESA orbiter. The UK sent the Beagle lander with Mars Express, but it was lost in the landing. That's nothing to be ashamed of.. every country that has tried to go to Mars has had failures. If these three agencies keep trying, they'll have plenty of success in studying Mars, or any other planet they choose to visit.

<rant>

This is not a complete sentence; there's no verb.

We use present perfect tense for referring to events that happened at an unspecified time in the past. You can't use it when you specify that the event happened last month.

The rest of this sentence is too long and complicated. In addition, it has two verbs. Compounding the problem, the two verbs have opposing tenses.

I really do dislike grammar nazis, and I try to avoid ever saying anything about errors since I make plenty myself, but these kinds of errors are hard to read and understand. Timothy, do you even read things before they get posted?!

</rant, hopefully forever.>

Seriously, I do appreciate what all the /. editors do. It's hard to parse through all the article submissions that you get and make sure everything makes sense. It's also hard for us to parse the posted article summaries when the grammar mistakes make one's head spin.

IANAB, but it doesn't make sense to me that this experiment does what she is claiming. I can understand learning about "ancestral phenotypes", but "replay the molecular tape of life"? That would only be possible if the cells were exposed to the same conditions they would have 500 million years ago, correct? With environmental conditions being a chaotic system, you'd have to get it exactly right-- impossible given we don't have an exact knowledge of those conditions. At best you might argue that you can show chaotic fluctuations in the system have little impact if the evolution takes nearly the same track, but then you'd have to wait 500 million years for that... Unless modern E. Coli is more prolific than it's ("great-" * 10e9) + "grandparents."

I would think if you're examining fixed vs multi-point evolutionary paths, a better experiment would be to clone a number of cells (cloned to ensure identical genetics at the start) and grow them in isolated but (very nearly) identical environments. Using ancient DNA sequences won't help us see if the path leads to modern genes without waiting a few thousand millenia.

Again, IANAB, but the premise of this experiment seems ill-placed. Any biologists around that can clarify for us?

+1 Spot-On.

The only thing I would add is that our focus on change needs to be at the base level-- it's far easier to move a mountain by pushing at its base than by poking at the top, but it does take a lot more effort. The change needs to start within the families. When parents are more involved with their children and excited about their education, that's a huge step toward motivating and exciting the kids themselves. If parents are more involved in the teaching process (and I don't mean by telling the teacher they're a failure because their child didn't perform well enough), teachers have more feedback to be able to help the children well. Yes, teachers need to improve too, and I think that improvement should include continued education on their own part, but the best place to start is in the family.

Proofs exist, and many people could provide the proofs. It wouldn't do any good, however, because you'd just wave it off.

The problem isn't with the proof, the problem is with the AXIOMS. Very good and convincing proofs of the existence of God are there, if you take a particular set of axioms as the basis for your outlook. That's the faith part.

It's a real problem in our world today that people take math and science as gospel. Everyone seems to forget that all of math and science are based on axioms, things that we assume must be correct because there's no way to prove it. We have to make those assumptions, though, to do anything at all. You might say "well, so far nothing has shown those assumptions to be wrong, so we must be right!", but that's only good to a point. Newton's law of gravity is correct, but only if you assume a Euclidean geometry. Is that correct? Well... not exactly... but that doesn't make Newton's laws worthless; many models we run on today rely on those principles which aren't, technically, true.

So I'm sorry, but I decline to offer my proofs. If you'd like to talk axioms, on the other hand, that might be a more interesting (and fruitful) conversation.