And how long is that excuse valid for? It's not like Europe has been very peaceful and tripped Africa up on purpose, we've started two world wars in the last 100 years on our own turf. Yes, I realize problems don't go away in a day or a year or even a decade but look how far Europe has come in the last 70 years. How far has Africa come? How much aid money, emergency relief, how many education and healthcare programs have they gotten for free?

Still trotting out that old excuse and blaming the white man for all their woes is probably going to backfire. It only nourishes the people who think Africa is the way it is because they're primitive deadbeats who can't get anything done on their own. It's not that there's anything wrong with the people as such, take a black man and put him in a different environment and he might end up as President and a Harvard magna cum laude graduate.

My impression is that most of Africa's problems are cultural, like for example the response to Ebola. If they'd just stop touching their dead and seek medical help they'd do fine, but through ignorance and indifference and working against those trying to help them they'll just let it spread. Like HIV, there's a reason it's a huge problem south of Sahara and practically nowhere else and it's because for some cultural reason they just don't seem to value safe sex.

Probably pretty much everything.

Matter and anti-matter are--up to a flip in charge and parity--the same thing. That is, if you take an electron (a matter particle), flip its charge and look at in a mirror you'll see a positron (an anti-matter particle).

So it is actually perfectly consistent, logically if not linguistically, for dark matter to be entirely anti-matter.

Exotic dark matter can also produce anti-matter when its particles collide with each other, which is what this report seems to be about. The significant thing is that the energy spectrum of the positrons that the AMS detector sees appear to have about the right energy spectrum for one particular type of exotic dark matter (which I personally have a pretty low prior for).

There are a whole bunch of follow-on papers from other people doing what scientists do, which is check for consistency between the exotic dark matter interpretation of this result and reality, in the sense that if this signal really is due to exotic dark matter there should be a number of different consequences (including the anti-proton signal the article mentions): http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/al...

tl;dr version: How do you make a million dollars in astronomy? Start with ten million dollars.

Taxes fix anything

Parent post is a good example of quibbling over words.

The stuff is called "high fructose" because sucrose, or normal table sugar, is one fructose molecule bonded to one glucose molecule but HFCS contains 5% of fructose that is not bound to a glucose molecule. This is significant. Hydrogen peroxide used in wound treatments is only 3% H2O2 and 97% H2O, but has very different physiologic effects than plain H2O.

While HFCS could be used in lower quantities for the same level of sweetness as sucrose, it is often used to make the product sweeter than could be done with sucrose alone. As is the case in many soft drinks sold in the USA. But the more significant concern is that HFCS laden foods and drinks cause one to crave more since the HFCS interferes with the "I've had enough" mechanisms that normally govern food/drink intake. And another concern that bears repeating is that HFCS puts an increased burden on the liver and the blood glucose homeostatic mechanisms that are adapted to handling normal table sugars.

Again, my personal concern is that HFCS on the label is a marker I can use to avoid foods and drinks that predispose me to exercise induced asthma problems. And I don't care whether it is the HFCS or some other crap that is often used when HFCS is adulterating the food.

Most artificial sweeteners sold in powder form contain a simple sugar or starch to add bulk and give the product free-flowing granules more similar to sugar. Since saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame all taste hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, they are used in much lower amounts, with bulk added for the consumer-serving preparations so that you don't have to add micrograms of sweetener to your coffee to get the equivalent sweetness of sugar. Either glucose (usually listed as dextrose) or maltodextrin are generally used, which is interesting since it means that sugar substitutes generally contain a small amount of carbohydrates. The little single-serving packets tend to have about 3 (kilo)calories each; in the US, the FDA allows foods with less than 5 calories to be labeled as "zero calorie," so they generally are.

I note that this study did happen to use all powder-form sweeteners (dissolved in water) which means that there would some small amount carbohydrate in the solution. That's a perfectly reasonable way to run this study, since these are widely used preparations of these sweeteners, but I do wonder if there might be a difference with a genuinely digestible-carbohydrate-free preparation.

HFCS is more of a "super sugar" than a sugar substitute. Fructose is a natural sugar, and HFCS in its pure laboratory form is only a highly concentrated fructose derived from corn. (high fructose corn syrup).

For me at least, it is a health concern since if I eat or drink some things that contain HFCS I am more prone to asthma attacks. This may not be due to the HFCS itself; it may be some impurity in food quality HFCS, or it may be some other additive that is commonly used with HFCS. I don't care: I know if I avoid HFCS I don't have asthma; otherwise I often have exercise induced asthma which really limits my bicycling.

HFCS is used in foods and drinks for a couple of reasons: it has a sweeter taste than sucrose; it has a documented affect on depressing satiation so people consume more of the product than if sucrose was used; and I think because it is a liquid that is often shipped in railway tanker cars its delivery costs to the food factory are cheaper.

Fructose is a form of sugar that has to be converted in the liver to a different form before it can be used. HFCS puts a strain on the liver, and the blood glucose regulatory mechanisms, that does not occur with any natural foods. Anyone with a history of hepatitis, hypoglycemia, or diabetes maybe would want to avoid HFCS.

Yes, yes I have. But thank you for being a precious snarky asshole.

Europe is larger than the US, with a comparable population. How come sparsely-populated areas of, for example, Sweden and Norway can have blindingly-fast internet, whereas similarly-populous areas of the US have terrible internet? Your argument is clearly nonsense.

I think he's hinting that internet connectivity should be a municipal service, as it is in some parts of the world (which offer better speeds than most US ISPs seem to offer).

Size has nothing to do with it. Each ISP has local networks connected to each other (and other ISPs) by larger connections. The exact same is true in Europe. If what you say is true, then US cities should have wonderful broadband, but that is clearly not the case. Europe is larger than the US, with a similar population, so your comparison isn't at all accurate, and the more you trot it out in discussions like this, the longer it will take to fix.

Cities don't give a ratfuck if your neighbors are pissed off. All they worry about is the tax. 14%? That's a steal compared to some places. That will of course double soon.

NFC has never caught on being freely available. It won't be adopted with even tighter restrictions. Sorry by NFC is a failure that was never articulated honestly or clearly, never implemented widely and so we don't know how or if it will work or what happens when it goes wrong.

Of course they're not as bad as ISIS, but to call the Christian Right "harmless" is not very accurate. The sheer number of people dying from back-alley abortions is a testament to that, and that's just one of their areas of "expertise".

But usually not capitalised, at least not since the late 1700s.