The protesters call themselves kanaka, the working class of precolonial Hawaii. Did you know that in that culture only the ali'i, the hereditary nobility, were permitted to go above the treeline on Mauna Kea? Thus by the laws of their own culture, the protesters at the 9,000 ft level, are there illegally.

The Cat should make short work of the piled-up rocks, and the high-pressure hoses would be ready in case the demonstrators start throwing anything.

Now that science itself is under attack, we need to be prepared to defend it.

" Freight rail in the US, which is a much, much better use of resources, on the other hand, is top of the world."

Except for our umpty-ump brazillion grade crossings. If we could only get these separated, we would be able to increase freight speeds enough so that a few passenger trains could be sent through on each route with realistic, competitive run times.

If the government wants to help the railroad business, let it build grade separations, a type of construction that governments on all levels are already used to. Then let railroad men invest in improving the railroads.

"And why would it take 5-6 hours for emergency help to arrive? This thing is not in the middle of nowhere, it is following I-5 between LA and SF."

Because it's California, and that's probably how long it would take to file all the required statements of environmental impact and get a court's okay, even with the expedited procedures I'm sure would be put in place if Hyperloop were actually built.

Uhhh...no. All they did was introduce into wheat a gene from peppermint. What kingdoms there must be in your own mind to imagine any danger from that.

There's already a tunnel to France. He only has to dig as far as Folkestone.

Three years ago when my organization convened in Reno, one of our speakers was a local madam who explained how this works.

The story does not indict GMO technology in any way. It just states that a given modification didn't work as intended.

To see what I mean, imagine this headline:

"Use of Hybridization to Cross Labrador and Poodle Results in Dog With Incredibly Ridiculous Name"

And now we know that transgenic processes occur in nature too.
http://arstechnica.com/science...

This is the "GMOs are evil because Monsanto" argument. So why do the flat-earthers attack GMO test plots that ARE open source, like that golden rice in the Philippines? Your argument is against legal bullying by corporate extension of patent, not anything to do with genetic engineering.

If we ever do get around to a project this large in scale, both efforts will probably occur. Mars will be modified toward human habitability, and a human species "fork" will be engineered to meet it halfway. Because of this we wouldn't want to use the term terraforming, exactly. How about 'bioforming'?

Best of all: Nobody who is anti-GMO would want any part of this, and good riddance. Less woo will mean more progress in every field.

"2) In the UK people are not paid for blood - it's a donation."

I'm sure you people believe that poor Americans are required by their slave overseers to trade their blood for the Krispy Kreme donuts they can't do without, but that's not how it works. It was recognized that paying for blood would attract the wrong kind of donor, so we set up a system called "blood banking": middle-class people, the kind who have to pay dearly for their healthcare, donated blood in exchange for credit against future need for blood units from the medical system. If a relative needed blood or a public appeal went out for someone in need of large amounts of blood, you could assign your units.

But this started cutting into hospital profits, so we stopped doing the credits accounting. The medical system now has to keep wheedling for uncredited donations from the same middle-class people, generally by setting up blood drives through offices and organizations and trying to get people to compete with their coworkers. Absent the credits, they are now always short of blood.

The claim of being able to detect hidden electronics is extremely easy to test. Why haven't we run experiments on people who say they have this power?

Yes, perhaps we too can do it the German way. All we need to do is reopen all our old coal-fired power plants, while at the same time encouraging Mexico to install nuclear, so we can buy it from them.

Is millions of external HDs being hastily plugged in and spinning up.