I also notice the list of representatives include folk from Npower, BP, CBI and the US Embassy. Not exactly the standard sources of hardcore left wingers. Still best to gloss over these folk as focusing on them may not fit in with the promotion of FUD.

Clearly a generally pro science network supporting the scientific consensus is an important tale that absolutely warrants such a massively informed debate.

I would imagine it would be far far easier to breed (or use GM techniques) to make a crop plant that can deal with what is effectively a super short season than to attempt to light up the night. You could even store some of the daytime heat and smooth the "seasonal" temp transitions using a high heat capacity plastic mixed into the soil.

Given tundra based trees survive months with no usable light due to thick snow cover and natural summer annuals often only get light for growth for a few weeks a year this doesn't seem the biggest issue with moon farming.

Maybe try googling " lifetime risk car accident america" and reading the very first link:

http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/trasnsportpop.html

They give annual US odds at 1:~6200 and lifetime odds of 1:~80.
*sighs*

Okay "very bad" -> "far below average".

The main advantage of computer driven cars is that they learn faster than humans. A human is at a massive learning disadvantage as he can't exactly replicate his actions, recall his sensory input perfectly, vary aspects of his driving without affecting other aspects nor make changes that are smaller than his biologically imposed resolution limit. The computer can learn more from every previous race and try more things in the search for lower lap times. After sufficient versions/updates (and assuming a sporting governing body doesn't implement blocking rules) the AI's ability will exceed the upper limit imposed by the biology of the driver.

I can't see any other way this could possible work out.

So you think that lethal accidents are caused by a minority of very bad drivers. Very bad as in not mere speeding or not paying attention as almost everyone does occasionally. That would be interesting if true. Do you have any stats. or links to back that up?

I would (perhaps naively) have assumed that most types of non trivial road accidents have a chance of lethality. So I wouldn't expect those involved in lethal accidents to have a significantly different ability distribution to normal accidents.

Damn straight, why worry about the safety of yourself or others when you can be having fun.

For Americans death by car accident is about a 1 in 100 lifetime chance not massive but hardly minuscule. If you could say half that is that not a reasonable thing to do.

Thou of course everyone is an above average driver so the odds don't apply to them.

messed up the figures there it should be 0.00001% instead of 0.01%

I once mentioned shielding to a X-ray laser physicist who was talking about his high energy X-ray laser. "Aren't you worried about shielding?". The reply "O no our X-rays don't go that far in air."

That's when I realized that laser physicists have a slightly different interpretation of high-energy than most radiation physicists. I only consider high energy X-rays those at 100 keV+.

Sort of killing the buzz here but if you read the paper and maybe look at figure 2B you will see why this technique (high-harmonic generation) cannot be extended to be usable at higher keV beam without the laws of physics changing. At the current higher end their efficiency has fell to what 0.01% and falling fast.

Yes but they also fight over here. Just look at the German Motorola Vs Apple war.

I don't see how you can blame Google for an Apple led consortium giving a load of their patents to a massive patent troll (after promising to license them reasonably). You can blame Google and Intel for pushing up the price that's about it.

It would surprise me and most Atomic physicists. The exact made up of weapon components is secret but the interactions of X-rays with matter, even hot dense matter is not and such experiments are well within the domain of even an average university lab.

It's too small to be useful in tradition lens applications. Even at lower X-ray/Gamma energies when the refractive index is much bigger ( see: http://henke.lbl.gov/optical_constants/getdb2.html) you can't really use make reasonable lens.

It would be far far easier to increase the "commonly" available divergent sources' intensity than attempt to recover losses due to divergence with such a weakly focusing system. Hell, you could likely achieve a much bigger intensity increase by moving the source closer.

Can anyone even think of the medical imaging system they are envisaging. I assume they mean a phase-contrast approach but that needs a intense 700kV source with a small spot size and thin structured grating that absorb 700kV photons (which I don't think exist thou it's maybe just about within the capacity of man to make them).

The only application I can think of for this is for X-ray telescopes and astrophysics where you can't increase the source but you can have massively long imaging systems. However I will bet that their are not many interesting astrophysical events that emit only 700kV+ photons and the attenuation of the massive silicon lens may well counteract the benefit of the focusing.

The immediate never mind long term carcinogenic effect of very low dose radiation is not settled either way even in the simple case of cells. You can trudge through the related links and responses to them at :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
if you want to bore yourself.

The problem is it's very difficult to detect the difference between a small negative effect and a similarly sized positive one. Plus due to complicating effects like the bystander one it is likely that the pattern, flux and nature of the applied radiation will complicate the results.

At such low radiation levels in more complex organisms to know for certain you would need to have an unethical massive experiment using millions of animals with half being irradiated in a precisely controlled way. Rightly so this doesn't happen and so researchers have to look at smaller samples often with massive variations between them. Which is why the issue is not settled.

O and all radiation isn't bad, look at radiotherapy :-)

Couldn't agree more on the terminology. Eg phase-shift,interference,diffraction,scattering all used to describe similar things in different fields.
Yes I did wonder about double slit experiments (started in Atomic physics) but more so about the pattern's mere existence for single photons. The question of its shape seems trivial by comparison. :-) But thats for another board.