It is possible to sorb ethanol into a dextrin. The problem is that the volume/mass of sorbent is much larger than the amount of alcohol that can be bound.

So, if you want to bind 10 ml of ethanol (approximately 1 shot), then you may need 100 grams of powder. Which makes the product of limited value.

If, however, you want something iso-intoxicating to 10 ml of ethanol, you can reasonably safely do that with about 500 ul of 2-methyl, 2-butanol, which could be sorbed in 5 grams of powder. The latter is a practical product which meets the description of "palcohol"

Never mind the powdered form, what about getting the liquid in concentrated form?

"Palcohol" is not ethanol, but the highly intoxicating 2-methyl, 2-butanol, which is about 30x as potent at causing intoxication as ethanol. Despite being termed one of the "toxic alcohols", it probably has lower chronic toxicity than ethanol, as being a tertiary alcohol, it cannot be oxidised to toxic aldehydes/ketones.

Not quite correct. Galileo (when it is eventually commissioned) will specifically have the ability to detect the signal from 406 MHz from emergency locator beacons.

Because existing beacons use signals not designed for time of arrival detection, location would still rely on Doppler processing techniques, but location to within 1 mile or so should be achievable with this system. There are plans to change the modulation of emergency locator beacons to permit time-of-arrival localisation with 10 meter precision.

There are several sources of Doppler shift and compensation. There is Doppler shift between aircraft and satellite, and between satellite and ground station. The ground station automatically compensates for all the Doppler shift between GS and satellite.

The Doppler shift between aircraft and satellite is partially compensated by tracking the Doppler shift in transmissions from the satellite to the aircraft. Without compensation by the aircraft, Doppler shift would be in the region of 300-400 Hz, which exceeds the bandwidth of the channel allocation. The compensation is subject to local oscillator error in the aircraft transceiver, hence individual aircraft will apply the compensation slightly differently.

Although the degree of compensation varies between aircraft to aircraft, it could be fitted with a standard linear regression. This method was apparently verified by Inmarsat on several other aircraft with similar transceivers, and was calibrated based upon transmissions with known locations/velocities.

Indeed, most of the issues with the EPR could have been predicted and prevented - it has been a clear example of inept project management. The major problems have been:

• Out of spec concrete: Nuclear grade concrete needs strict porosity control, and very large seamless pours. Conventional concrete formulations and QA techniques (slumping) are not feasible, and advanced formulations blended to strict proportions are needed. The problem is that the contractors they employed to do the concreting lied about their ability to make nuclear grade concrete. When the regulator inspected the site in Finland, they found that the concrete contractors were blending the aggregates and cement without taking into consideration the water adsorbed onto damp materials. As a result the concrete did not meet the porosity specification. The foundation slab had to be relaid.
• Out of spec welding: This was further compounded by the fact that many of the required welds were first-of-a-kind, requiring welding of unique dissimilar metals at unprecedented scales in very difficult configurations, requiring the development of new welding equipment as it became clear during dummy runs, that existing equipment could not achieve the quality required
• Problems with scale: The sheer size of the EPR and volume of concrete and steel for the containment made it difficult to source enough workers of any skill. There were frequent communication problems due to language barriers, and it was difficult to ensure that all staff were kept aware of issues. For example: Areva were unable to source enough welders locally. Welders from as far away as Bulgaria were brought in. However, due to language difficulties and inexperience with the QA required, many welds were not made to adequate quality and had to be remade.
• Overly aggressive construction schedule: The planned construction would have been the fastest construction of a nuclear plant ever, quite a bold claim, considering that hte EPR is also the most complex ever builtstarted.
• Insufficient skilled staff: Construction started before design was complete. In particular, control systems had not completed design and verification. The prime contractor also had insufficient architects and engineers to ensure that all designs had been completed to the level of detail required for construction.
• Failure to validate the supply chain: Construction started before the designers had adequately assessed the global supply chain for parts. There were numerous delays due to excessive lead times for parts which had not been planned for, particularly as many part manufacturers had wound down their facilities due to the death of nuclear plant construction in Europe.

Similar issues, but to a much smaller extent have also cropped up in France on their EPR construction. They've had problems with poor quality welding too, as well as difficulty finding enough competent staff.

You mean 200%. Electricity costs in the UK are $0.06/kWh in bulk. Offshore wind has a breakeven price of $0.25/kWh. Things may change in time, and I wouldn't suggest withdrawal of subsidies until we see the potentials and unavoidable drawbacks of the technology. However, to illustrate the point, the UK government recently announced a plan to cut the offshore wind guaranteed purchase price to $0.24/kWh and suddenly a whole bunch of investors threatened to pull out of projects, so the govt backtracked.

A major reason Germany can cope with large amounts of renewables, are because its grid is tightly tied to numerous neighbouring countries. Effectively, the whole of continental Western Europe is tightly interconnected and synchronised.

This allows Germany to use imports/exports to help absorb fluctuations in wind supply outturn. Germany have also been shutting down slow responsing nuclear plants and replacing them with coal and gas turbine plants which are faster to respond.

However, the UK has had significant problems with grid stability after the establishment of a large amount of wind energy. National grid have already increased the maximum allowable "rate of change of frequency" (ROCOF) to 1 Hz/s, because their previous operational limit of 0.1 Hz/s was being continually exceeded due to wind variability. For interconnected systems which depend on ROCOF to detect grid failure (e.g. small scale generation - combined heat power schemes, rooftop solar PV, small scale wind), the previous operational limit was being exceeded frequently enough to result in various "chain reaction" type events. For example, a thermal power plant trips out, causing frequency to fall at a significant but not critical rate - at the same time a random variation in wind output results in a temporary loss of output. Together, this is sufficient to trigger ROCOF protection on embedded generators, causing them to trip off, suddenly withdrawing supply to a grid which already has an excess of demand. Some of these events have been severe enough to trigger emergency load shedding with up to 50k homes disconnected due to low frequency.

I was wondering how this was going to cut power prices. In the UK, which is now the world leader in offshore wind, the levellized cost of off-shore wind energy is approximately $0.25/kWh at the onshore cable termination.

Obviously, this is completely non-viable for a large grid without subsidies (in the UK, these are approximately $0.19/kWh), but for a small grid dependent on expensively imported diesel, this can be a reasonable idea.

It has 7/8 of the processor. In traditional GPU designs, this would mean that only 7/8 of the RAM is addressable and that the RAM data bus is only 7/8 as wide - as parallel modules of both stream processor, L2 cache and memory controller get disabled.

The 1st 3.5 GB operates on the 7/8 wide bus (224 bits); this is the same as on any other reduced core count card. However, nvidia added a new "bypass" bus inside the GPU permit 2 memory controllers to be driven by a single L2 cache module. This avoids the need to reduced addressable RAM in the event of a L2 cache module being disabled. This last memory controller without a dedicated L2 cache module then accesses the top 0.5 GB of RAM via a 1/8 wide (32 bit) bus.

The key point is to allow the reactor to cool for 24 hours or so in a maximally controlled environment - grid power, with backup diesel generators and full tanks for fuel. Once you're through the first 24 hours, the thermal load of decay heat is almost an order of magnitude lower, and much easier to handle.

It is also undesirable to expose the plant to grid transients. Short circuits on the grid, can cause severe mechanical disturbances to the alternator and turbomachinery. In a nuke plant, the LP turbines are typically very large, low speed machines with huge blades. These are susceptible to shock loadings due to their high moment of inertia. In fact, in nuke plant turbines, grid transients are one of the most important factors in determining fatigue life of the turbine assembly.

More over, there is a degree of thermo-hydraulic coupling between the turbine and reactor (or at least the steam generators) - these pressure and heat transients are also a contributor to fatigue life of the primary coolant circuit.

That's not quite correct. There was no some damage to the emergency cooling systems, but it wasn't catastrophic.

At unit 1, the emergency isolation (condenser) cooling system (UPS powered) were manually turned off about 20-30 minutes after the earthquake, because they didn't want to "cold shock" the reactor, and switched instead to alternate methods of cooling (which required AC power). In the confusion that followed loss of AC power, they relied on staff to run outside and check the emergency cooling vents for steam. Staff were not familiar with the volume of steam which should flow from the isolation cooling system (should completely engulf the plant in thick cloud) and reported "faint steam" which was presumed to be due to operation of the isolation cooling system - but was, in fact, residual heat in the vent stacks, as they cooled following shutdown of the isolation condensers. Unit 1 likely suffered total core meltdown within 3-4 hours of the earthquake.

At plants 2 and 3, the emergency cooling system failed after the UPS systems powering the control systems depleted their batteries - a period of about 9 hours after the earthquake. Partial meltdown likely occurred within a few hours of core cooling loss. The extent of core damage is much lower than occurred in unit 1 because the first few hours are when decay heat is highest, and therefore severity of meltdown drops dramatically once through this period.

Fire pumps were brought in to inject water into the reactors at units 2 and 3. In this case, the water pooled in a tank and never reached the reactor. This was not due to a valve fault. The plan to inject water using fire pumps was an ad hoc plan, and the assumption was that the tank was connected to the injection line via a "positive displacement" pump (which would act as an obstruction to flow when unpowered), in fact, the pump was an impeller pump, through which the water could flow with ease. Even if this had worked, this was too late anyway, meltdown would have been near complete by the time the pumps were brought on site, and connections made.

The main lessons learned were: Don't turn off safety systems during an emergency Make sure staff are able to recognise the correct operation of safety systems Ensure that plans for the emergency provision of cooling water are pre-prepared, validated and well rehearsed. Ensure that emergency portable pumps are available near (but not too near) to site, and that their performance has been validated as acceptable Ensure adequate redundancy of hydrogen-oxygen catalytic recombiners Don't forget about the fuel pools.

You raise an interesting point that the interaction of various sensor assist systems can be erratic

In your example, your description cannot be technically correct, although I am not denying that it introduces a degree of instability that would not otherwise exist. Traction control does not, and cannot, apply the brakes. It also does not assume you are or are not in a spin, only that one wheel has lost grip. More advanced systems, e.g. ESC, do detect spin, but they do it with a yaw rate sensor, so it is directly measured, not assumed. The normal operation of traction control is to detect one of the drive wheels spinning faster than the other wheels, and when activated it reduces engine torque (through triggering fuel cut, ignition retard, and/or electronic throttle closure).

One of the things that OEMs found after integrating systems like traction control, stability control, ABS, etc. was that at the boundaries of slip/acceleration/yaw between the systems and normal operation, there were discontinuities in the vehicle dynamics. So, that if you were accelerating, and a drive wheel slipped, there would be a sudden, dramatic reduction in engine torque; or in the event of an impending spin, there would be a dramatic braking of the inside wheel, which could lead to an overcorrection.

Over the last 5 years, the OEMs have realised this, and they have been working very hard to smooth the discontinuities that these systems create. There are all sorts of marketing words for this, e.g. Toyota have "Vehicle dynamics integrated management". All this means is that the sensitivity and power of these systems has been carefully matched to the car and each other, to avoid sudden shocks.

You have made my point (which admittedly I didn't make very clearly). What is useful is a knowledge of anatomy, and knowing what the potential problems are, and careful examination of the raw data of the CT scan. A skilled doctor would have specifically looked for the optic nerve in relation to the tumor. For whatever reason, this was not detected, or not communicated appropriately, resulting in a delayed treatment.

Complex 3D rendering or printing, while it looks impressive, generally isn't all that useful for making the diagnosis - the raw (or minimally processed) data tends to show the anatomical relations most clearly. The raw volumetric data shows everything; a 3D rendering depends upon some sort of thresholding, and the 3D projection necessarily results in occlusion and obscuration of objects. The thing about 3D rendering is that it is immediately recognisable by the lay person, or doctors without specific training in interpretation of CT, whereas the appearance of the anatomy is rather alien to most people when presented as cross-sectional raw data.

As for treating tumors, I'm afraid you're wrong about that. Watch and wait is very important for tumours around the eye and base of skull, because the anatomy here is so complex and fragile that the whole tumor may not be removable, or may be removable only at significant cost (loss of vision, facial disfigurement, risk of infections due to bone holes, etc.) For this reason, if a tumour is only causing minor symptoms, and there is good reason to suspect a benign tumor (i.e. not cancer liable to spread elsewhere in the body), there are often good reasons to delay surgery, until such time as the symptoms resulting from side effects of surgery are likely to be less than the symptoms from the tumor.

Can someone explain why in the example race condition code given, the theoretical minimum count is 2, and not n_iters?.