Google and Facebook certainly get extra developer buy-on for open sourcing some things. Or perhaps more accurately, for adding to existing open source initiatives.

Also: github! I think they probably get an advantage from open sourcing some of their stuff (although it's not all open)... After all, they're the premier open source hosting site.

I was with you right up until this bit. The arrogant presumption just drips off these words.

I don't think it's encrypted, but I think the methods of encoding the transmissions are incredibly arcane and the formats for the data are nothing even approaching standard (standards for such things didn't exist back then). Probably more important is that the only radio receivers in the entire world that are capable of detecting its signal are run by NASA...

There isn't just "one guy" who says this. There have been hundreds of papers showing links between weather extremes and global warming. To be fair, weather extremes aren't always bad either... if the "extreme" is that a major rainstorm passes over Texas right now, that's better. The problem is that (as was stated above), we've built most of our society around assuming the climate that existed before global warming. If this changes drastically, a lot of people are going to die before we settle back into whatever the new normal is climate-wise. It's not that global warming is bad per se, just that it's bad if it occurs too quickly for humanity and the ecosystem to respond.
 
  Oh, and then there's the fact that increased CO2 is turning the oceans acidic. That gets much less news, but is potentially much more destructive from a world-wide perspective. And there's no possible way you can say that isn't associated with CO2 levels in the atmosphere. And all you have to be able to do to know that's anthropogenic is how to count.

(I *am* a physicist) Actually, the original paper *did* measure time with GPS - more to the point, they use GPS to establish a common frame between the two locations. Look at Figure 5 of the OPERA paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1).

Having said that, as other replies have noted, this kind of correction is well-understood, so while it isn't explicitly laid out as far as I can tell, it's unlikely the OPERA group screwed this up. What may well be true, though, is that there may be systemic offsets either in the GPS timing system, the implementation at Gran Sasso (they actually have a big waveguide that they run from the Earth's surface all the way to the GPS reveivers they have by their detector deep underground), or any of the myriad corrections that were needed to determine the time-of-flight baseline (although as far as I can tell they worked very hard to get this measurement right...).

It's also rather suggestive that the author of this paper has no particle physics (or even physics) credentials. So he/she probably doesn't know the OPERA collaboration's processes very well (admittedly, these details should be in the paper, but the tradition of the community is to not do that sort of detail in announcement papers like this...)

Keep in mind they did just have a huge management overhaul. That doesn't guarantee that they fixed the problems, but it certainly means they are aware of and are trying to fix the management issues.

From the article:

The team analysed the isotopes of the elements lead and neodymium to place the age of a sample of a FAN at 4.36 billion years. This figure is significantly younger than earlier estimates of the Moon’s age that range to nearly as old as the age of the solar system itself at 4.567 billion years.

So when they say 200 million years younger, that means 4.3 byr instead of 4.5 byr. I'm sure this is interesting to those in the field, but I don't think that counts as "much younger".

That's not true at all. Nearly every field in the physical and natural sciences now depends heavily on modeling. Now, it is true that some of those models are easier to calibrate with data than others... And climate science is indeed one of the hardest ones to test because there are so many feedbacks that you can't really test some of the parameters independent of the others. But that doesn't make it "wrong" or "biased", just hard.

This is exactly the attitude I encounter very often when I talk to other physicists and astrophysicists (I'm the latter). But I think this actually is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. While it's true that many of the codes we write will never be re-examined by anyone, a few of them will. But many scientists write totally inscrutable code, so no one bothers trying to re-use code in that way, because it's easier to just start over from scratch. Thus, no wonder everyone thinks no one is going to look at their code - if they wrote more readable code, perhaps someone would!

That being said, I certainly have had to take code from someone and build upon it or make it work properly for a slightly different instrument or something like that, and I can definitely say that I'm biased, because those experiences are invariably the most frustrating work I find myself doing! Part of it is that a lot of scientists seem to say "if I add comments everywhere, that's all that's needed to make it easy/readable," but they then don't follow indentation rules, or consider their code structure before they implement, or consider possible extensions of their code when they are writing it. So it wouldn't take that much more work, but some scientists just don't realize that in fact it probably is worth the effort for the sake of future work.

No, this is a very strong distinction in *some* fields. For example, in observational astrophysics, most scientists spend much of their actual working time writing code... but they clearly think of themselves as "scientists" and not at all as programmers, with the mindset the article notes. Occasionally people get hired to be "software support" that are clearly supposed to be engineers/programmers, and they think in very different ways.

The end result is that despite programming as much as, if not more than, the "programmers", many of these scientists don't follow any of the rules about software readability and reuse that programmers have learned the hard way over decades. You can immediately look at code and tell who was trained to program by/as a scientist and who actually learned as a programmer: the algorithms often work just as well, but the former are impossible to understand and build on, while the latter are much more readable.

"Large" here simply means large compared to the Planck scale. They're still typically small compared to, say, the universe's size. One of the main motivations for the models (often called ADD in the literature, after the authors of the first paper) is that string theories compatible with the ADD model typically are observable at roughly LHC energy scales. So this result does indeed disfavor the ADD varieties of string theorey, but they were thought up initially precisely because LHC-like colliders could test them. So the original post is correct in that lots of varieties of string theory are ruled out by this result, but there's a lot more left over.

The second part of this is not correct. No variety of string theory says there are physical dimensions "outside of" the 4d universe. Instead, the additional dimensions are written down the same way as the traditional 4, but are variously either "wrapped up" or have very small scales, and hence appear to not exist. The classic example is of an ant walking on a table - if you are the ant, and the table has lots of crap on it, you immediately notice the third dimension because it's roughly the same size as the table itself, so it's obvious that you're going up and down along with side-to-side. On the other hand, a very flat table might lead the ant to think there are only 2 dimensions. Similarly, in string theory, the extra dimensions aren't somehow "seperate from" the regular universe - they just have different scales or geometry that make them difficult to detect (not impossible - just very difficult sometimes).

Better yet, send astronauts - NASA did an internal survey of the astronaut corps a few years back on exactly this topic, and they found plenty of current astronauts (mostly those without family) that would volunteer for a one-way trip.

Actually, the explanation for this one is pretty simple: it's because the dark matter is dark. The reason why baryonic matter collapses into a (relatively) tiny disk in the center of a much larger dark matter halo is that baryonic matter emits light... and light carries off energy. So baryonic matter quickly loses all the energy it can while still conserving angular momentum, and the result is a disk-like structure (spiral galaxies). Once it collapses into a disk, the density becomes high enough that it can further clump into nebulae and stars and such. Dark matter, on the other hand, is much lower density and hence isn't able to collapse efficiently (i.e. its Jean's Length is much longer, if you want to think in terms of some simple math).

First of all, the fact that it isn't running right now should prove to you that there is a limited amount. I work in a physics department at a research university, and I can tell you the prices for Helium (esp. Helium-3) have absolutely skyrocketed (just like the helium does, as some later posts point out!) - if it were reasonably economical it would have restarted again by now. The problem is that it's a trace byproduct of other refining processes, and most of the easily accessible oil on the US southwest (where the Helium is most abundant) has become much more expensive. Just like oil, the problem isn't that there will actually be none left - just that it'll suddenly become much more expensive and some crucial applications will become economically infeasible, to the detriment of all.