Actually, some of us are chemists, believe it or not.

And I'm pretty sure Phil Plait would have a bit to say about anything astronomical.

Indeed.
I've occasionally wondered whether anyone at NASA has ever designed a UAV with oxygen or fluorine tanks instead of fuel tanks, for use on worlds with hydrogen/hydrocarbon atmospheres.

Going faster than c requires imaginary mass, if I recall my equations correctly. Of course, this article MAY have done something different than the basic playing with numbers everyone does when they first look at the SR equations. But the hype they're using to entice people to pay for the article doesn't indicate it actually contains anything new, or anything you can't figure out on your own with a standard physics textbook and 30 seconds of time.
Now one thing I haven't ever done calculations for is collisions between superluminal and subluminal objects. That might be worth pondering during a few idle minutes this afternoon.

Actually, with the assumption that light has zero rest mass, and therefore travels only at exactly c.
Index of refraction is a whole different story--Essentially you have electrons absorbing photons and emitting them again with a slight delay (Classically, lag caused by that whole electrons have mass thing preventing an instantaneous response to variations in the EM field).

And that has made me wonder by way of analogy--if a bunch of charged particles can effectively retard electromagnetic waves, would space filled with massive particles slow gravitiational waves?

...And no one to tell you your oncologist got his medical degree from Dr. Woo's School of Homeopathic Medicine.

It's an election year.

Aren't potentially dangerous tools supposed to be getting lost?

Speaking of idiots and clubs, who wants to claim copyright on a bunch of malware anyway? Isn't that like saying "Hey, I'm a cyberterrorist and I don't want you looking at my tools?"
Just saying, sometimes it's tempting to troll right back.

Not necessarily. Even if you divert the asteroid from a predicted collision, it's still in an orbit that passes close to Earth's orbit. Unless, of course, you divert it into the moon or other massive target--in which case you do get the hardon-creating explosion the public is looking for.

Granted /. got the error from their source but apparently someone didn't bother checking the abstract to the original paper.

Toughness and hardness are not the same thing.

OK, to be fair they did specify molecular bonds, now that I've read more closely...but then that would exclude ionic bonding, one would think.

Apparently the author of TFA has never heard of a type of material known as a metal either.

I think I'll have to dig up the Science article to get really meangful info on this.

Let me guess:

This will be followed by a ban on interference filters and the like, effectively making amateur astronomy illegal in all but the most remote rural locations?

Might as well get a few more of them out there:

The BIG (Beaming Intergalactic Goatse) Array

27 Dishes of Hot Grits

...Can the OP link a statement that 0.4 is next, or is he looking at the same outdated roadmap that's led people to believe "0.3.x is the last alpha" where x=10,11, or 12?

Even on the ReactOS forums it's been said that there will likely be a 0.3.14 release.

Or to be more precise, it evaporates, and the loss of heat due to the latent heat of vaporization results in cooling, which in turn results in freezing when the temperature gets sufficiently low (after which point you will still have some cooling due to sublimation of solid ice)..