I'd like to see them try to replicate the "myth" that a cannonball that is initially fired at a bunch of water can wind up skipping off a hill, go through a house 700 yards away, go through 6 lanes of traffic and come to rest in a car.

They probably won't be able to do it again and declare it busted.

I agree that too many assumptions can ruin a theory, but what's more important is that the assumptions you use aren't arbitrary. That the orbital planes are randomly distributed isn't an arbitrary assumption. Planetary orbital planes typically follow their parent stars' spin axis, and that spin axis is arbitrarily oriented (Here's a bad astronomy link where they discuss it. That's the best reference I could find right now). Thus, the orbital planes of the planets are very very very likely randomly oriented.

Just for kicks, if that's true then we can calculate the transit probability. If we observe a star that is approximately the size of our sun, and the orbital radius of one of its planets is the same as Earth's, the chances of the planet's orbit crossing in front of the star as viewed from a point very far away is ~0.005. That's pretty rare, although if one assumes that there are ~5 planets in the system (which is an arbitrary assumption), we now have a ~2.5% chance of seeing one of the planets transit the star if we look for long enough. And there are a lot of stars out there.

About 8 seconds into the video that they show, in the 4th lane from the bottom, am I seeing a cell split into two? It looks like it splits, then the daughters go in opposite directions more quickly than their parent cell moved...

Yep, I thought the same thing when I saw the article.

"The Drumhead" from season 4. A Klingon encodes 1701-D engine specs in protein sequences for the Romulans.

Ok then in that case, is there a reference for single-celled organisms that can completely turn themselves off at ~0 K temperatures and in a vacuum, then turn themselves back on? Now I'm really curious about this. I'm also thinking that after 30,000 years, the organism will have an enormous amount of UV, X-ray, and solar wind exposure that would break down most chemical bonds. That kind of exposure may not be immediately deadly to a larger organism that has a skin or outer shell, but for a single cell, that spells some bad news.

I've previously heard this quote of organisms surviving for up to 30,000 years in space, but does anyone happen to have a real scientific reference for it? I'm really wondering what can survive that long with no fuel at all, unless the argument is that the whatever rock the organism sits on during its travels through space happens to have some nutrients on it. Even the waterbear still needs some energy after it goes into a cryptobiotic state, right?

Hardly news? This experiment (mostly the LCLS, but hopefully the SSRL soon) is working on a picosecond (SSRL) and femtosecond (LCLS) timescale. The paper to which you refer is looking at nanosecond timescale information. Three to six orders of magnitude in time resolution. This means they can begin to look at motions of atoms and small chemical groups rather than only seeing motions of large (i.e. slow-moving) molecular subunits. Lots of interesting stuff happens on a ns timescale. A lot more stuff happens on a ps and fs timescale.

What was I thinking, you're totally right, my mistake (I should have known this, I work with lasers every day). It's really the fact that the lighthouse beam occupies a smaller solid angle than the possible full 4(pi) steradian.

I think the largest gain would be from the fact that communication radio signals can occupy an absurdly small frequency window, so even though a 100kW emission might fall off to a very small amount, it's all in a spectral range, so spectral power density is large.

Google is your friend.

Wow, what a great idea. In fact I did search for it, and found nothing for it in regards to RF atmospheric absorption during solar transits, hence the query for a reference.

As far as the inverse square law goes, while it is applicable for all forms of emission, the noise base on RF telescopes is incredibly low, meaning that we're really good at detecting it, especially with monster dishes. Hence SETI and the whole SETI@home project. The 1/r^2 law also implies that the radio source is emitting isotropically (i.e. like a blackbody), when RF trasmitters are not isotropic. So one might view the planet a bit like an RF lighthouse that is emitting beams, some of which might be kind enough to be pointed toward us. At which point the 1/r^2 law doesn't apply whatsoever. Thanks for the snarky attempt at being clever.

Do you happen to have a reference for this? I have never heard of radio astronomy being used to detect molecular signatures (frequently microwave and mm-wave, but not radio). The molecular signatures during solar transit to which you are referring have typically been studied using optical and infrared telescopes, since the 200-20000 nm range is the region in which vibrational and electronic transitions occur.

I figured they were looking for classic radio-frequency patterns, much like the ones we're constantly emitting from our broadcast stations.

Or maybe it should be Penny...

The problem there is that the Red Cross should never have slogans along the lines of "we're helping our boys over there!" One of the central principles of the IFRCRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent) is that they are neutral, even if there is a clear moral right and wrong. This is more of a means to an end in the sense that it allows them to help as many people as possible. Because they don't support any specific side of a conflict, they can go into very dangerous areas and help civilians or the wounded without fear of being attacked. That said, I'm not saying the IFRCRC has always stuck to this principle, and I wouldn't be surprised if WWII was an exception to their rule.

As far as charging for services goes, the IFRCRC is non-profit, but that doesn't mean that they don't have expenses. A modern case in point is that the American RC actually charges hospitals for the blood that they get during blood drives. However, they charge just enough to cover the costs of the blood drive + nurses, as opposed to many other blood drive companies that charge for blood in order to make a profit.

Actually, the degree of parabolic-ness is called parabolicity.