PV and air-con is fine for reducing your carbon emissions, but it ain't a reliable backup system.

OP is asking about Central Europe during winter. Solar is not an option - certainly not for backup.
Wind turbines are not economical on a small scale, and not reliable enough as a backup.

Backup power and heating is a common problem with well-know solutions:
generator, oil or LPG heater with stored fuel, improved insulation.
Heat needs may be reduced temporarily by covering windows, closing off unused rooms, taping gaps, lowering thermostat.

The government really should be building nuclear plants, and gas ones that can switch to pulverised coal or oil if needed, with large stockpiles near the site.

I'm going to call you out as a fake Aussie. "Pissed" means drunk here (we say "pissed off"), and we never call the British "Brits".

No. But Australia exports camels to the Arabs for racing stock.
https://www.google.com.au/#q=a...

Diversity of ideas and personalities is good, but not diversity when it is used as a euphemism for racial and gender quotas.
The United States has arguably benefited greatly in some areas from cultural diversity, (business, entertainment, arts, ...) but I do not see any evidence for that in engineering.
Places like Finland, Korea and Japan seem to have done just fine in technology without diversity. Better than most countries.

Worldwide, engineers are overwhelmingly male, despite all sorts of affirmative action policies, so excluding women, while unfair, would only lose you a small portion of the talent pool in that area. (Unlike other professions.)

Very funny. Except that Einstein emigrated to the US in 1933. In 1905 he lived in Switzerland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

He did say fine music and jazz, clearly implying a distinction.

Hasn't racial segregation just been replaced by postcode segregation?

Its getting more that way in Australia, with large variation in average scores of different schools.
Smart people in poor suburbs tend to send the kids to private schools (often Catholic), or get them into specialist programmes in non-local schools.

It is not even novel. TFA says the purpose is to bypass check-in. Some hotels have been using credit cards for many years now to do this. Eg small hotels after hours. It can even be made more secure by a PIN in your booking confirmation.

  Once you are checked in, nfc makes more sense. Can't they just use any existing nfc chip in your phone or credit cards for ID? Why all the trouble of getting your phone out?

Millions of uranium centrifuge parts sold openly:

http://www.alibaba.com/country...

Somebody call Colin Powell!

Smart guy, but not a great engineer. Unlike Archimedes water screw, his device does not work.
All DaVince did was see an ancient water-screw and suggest using it in the air. He was wrong.
Not that he ever even tested the idea so far as we know.

My 4-year-old can draw a flying robot, but I do not count that as an invention.

Did you work on the Mars Climate Orbiter?

Barely. The wheel only rotates twice a second, and they are keeping the weight close to the hub. The rotational energy will be small, and recovered by regenerative braking or coasting anyway. It really does not matter.
Unsprung mass is not much of an issue on a road bike either. Total mass is what counts, and this wheel _will_ make the bike more difficult to carry, e.g up stairs.

Really? That is faster than the average speed of cars in major cities. (Or minor cities at commuting hours.) And most cyclists would need a _very_ good tail-wind to maintain that speed on the flat on a regular bike.

There are good reasons to limit the speed: (aside from local regulations)
- safety (bike and rider's clothing are not designed for high-speed spills),
- battery life - power is proportional to the cube of velocity
- motor efficiency - designing a motor for higher speed will make it less efficient when it is really needed - hills and headwinds. Remember the motor has only one gear.

You are talking about an electric motorbike or moped, not a power-assisted bike. They do exist.

Thanks, I stand corrected. I see cardiac arrest means the blood flow stops, but hopefully the heart still has some movement.
(The point stands though, 8% survival for cardiac arrest, higher for other heart attacks. )

No, you just misread a badly written article.

The 8% is for cardiac arrest, i.e. the heart stops, without a defibrillator.
Heart attacks generally (myocardial infarction) are not quite so bad.

Branch? Not so much a branch, as the trunk, I would have said.