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Submission + - Most planets in the Universe are homeless

StartsWithABang writes: We like to think of our Solar System as typical: a central star with a number of planets — some gas giants and some rocky worlds — in orbit around it. Yes, there's some variety, with binary or trinary star systems and huge variance in the masses of the central star being common ones, but from a planetary point of view, our Solar System is a rarity. Even though there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy for planets to orbit, there are most likely around a quadrillion planets in our galaxy, total, with only a few trillion of them orbiting stars at most. Now that we've finally detected the first of these, we have an excellent idea that this picture is the correct one: most planets in the Universe are homeless. Now, thank your lucky star!

Submission + - Is Geometric Algebra finally adopted in STEM curricula? (wavewatching.net)

quax writes: It has been over a century that William Kingdon Clifford developed Geometric Algebra. Yet due to his untimely death it was quickly forgotten, only to be partially reinvented when Dirac tackled relativistic quantum mechanics and introduced spinors. But geometric algebra is much more versatile than that, for instance it makes for a better alternative to vector calculus, combining div and curl operators and doing away with the cross-product in favor of bivectors. It is such a straightforward unification of otherwise, disparate mathematical techniques that I very much regret that my physics curriculum twenty years ago didn't cover it. Has this changed? Have you encountered geometric algebra in an undergraduate program?

Comment Re:By far not the only design that does this. (Score 2) 200

Don't think accelerator reliability issues are much of a concern any more, the systems are pretty mature at this point. I see the many advantage in being able to produce tailored neutron energy spectrum to process as much waste as possible.

The latter is the main focus in my mind. Excess energy is just an added bonus. We need a process like this as burying the nuclear crap has become a politically untenable.

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