Ahem, what about the not so insignificant details such as transistor speed, performance, scalability, yield, and reliability?

To get transistors to the level they're at, they've had to be very carefully shrunk and the silicon carefully controlled for resistance and impurity level, something that these deposited semiconductors will be many, many orders of magnitude worse in each and every parameter.

There's not a whole lot of point making transistors that are 1,000 times larger, 1,000,000 more power-hungry, have 100,000 times lower yield, 10,000 times slower, and have 10,000 times shorter life, (as a rough estimate).

While these folks may have made something 100x faster than something else, it's still useless.

It's a phase-change -- that means HEAT, which means it takes time for the storage element to heat up, change phase, and then cool down. It's probably better than using punched cards, maybe even better than 1990 flash memory, but not a whole lot better.

    Memory technology today has to work on the nanosecond level-- phase-change is not going to get anywhere near that ballpark.

You also need storage that can be read and written thousands of times without degradation-- phase-change is unlikely to ever get to that level.

"Flying" a "space plane" is a meaningless accomplishment, even if it happened.

It takes a spitload of details, gotten exactly right, to make a safe, practical, reliable aerospace gadget.

The history of development of every thing that zooms has been fraught with a long if not also steep learning curve.
It took many tries for the USA to get the X-15 working smoothly.
Look up how many years the C-5A, C141, B-58, Atlas, B-1, and Patriot were in "development". Count up how many of those had to go back to the factory after a year to get new wings.

Anybody can put some metal on a booster and call it a "space plane". That does not make it one.

This is unusable. On my iMac, Safari pegs out at 100% and the fans spool up to top speed. NFG.

Reedeeculous.

The real test of cold fusion would be detecting neutrons, LOTS of them if they were getting kilowatts of heat. I'm too lazy to calculate again how many neutrons, but it's certainly enough to fry everybody in that room.

You'd think after Pons and that Margarine guy made the same dumb mistake, not claiming scads of neutrons, these guys would patch up that hole.

Now let's not go overboard here. The basic laws of Physics indicate that any "solar powered plane" is going to be a very iffy thing. You can only get 150 watts per square meter of wing surface, that's when the sun is shining and at right angles to the sun. So you're talking about a very slow and very underpowered airplane, with like at best some pitiful and hazardous climb rate.

No way it could ever be certificated for carrying humans.

Rocket fuel was a big research area in the 1950's. Dozens of very good chemists spent a whole load (hundreds of millions of 1950-size dollars) trying to make better rocket fuels.

( One of them wrote a informative and funny book about that time and place ).

The short summary is: Yes, you can make higher oomph rocket fuels and oxidizers with more oxygen in them.

But a lot of the formulas are impractical as:

(0) They were already discovered years ago, and discarded, but chemists don't like to write up their failures, and researchers don't like to read old moldy research summaries anyway.

(1) They're waaay too expensive to make, even for military uses.

(2) They are highly toxic, even more toxic than the widely-used hydrazines, which can kill you in several interesting ways.

(3) They're so unstable, you have to keep them under impossible conditions, like no sound, no vibrations, no light, and under a part per million of crud in the perfectly-smooth and unscratched nickel-plated tanks.

(4) They can't be stored for more than a day or so before the fuel or oxidizer starts decomposing itself or the tank walls.

(5) Too many of the researchers were vaporized while handling the stuff. Literally. Truly. Completely. That tends to make it hard to find substitute researchers to continue working with the same stuff.

(6) For military applications, you need a fuel that can be handled by raw recruits, stored for many months, be pumped quickly into not always totally clean rocket tanks, kept in those loaded rockets for days to months, and tolerate wide temperature swings. These requirements alone disqualify a large percentage of really zippy fuels and oxidizers.

The odds are pretty high against this "new" compound being all that new, or it passing the basic requirements for fuel or oxidizer.

If you read TFA, it turns out what they have done so far is drill a tiny hole.

    Everything else is still TBD. Things like:

(1) Figuring out how to get a thread of DNA to enter the hole.

(2) Figuring out how to push it through the hole.

(3) Figuring out how to read the bases, which are electrically equivalent and somewhat shielded by the phosphorous backbones..

(4) Figuring how to keep DNA and other crud from getting wedged in this nanometer-width hole.

Somehow I think they're doing this all backwards-- doing the trivial part first and announcing what at first glance appears to be total success.

>My bench top pancake style geiger counter detects alpha particles from 35S and beta particles from 32P just fine. I'm sure it would handle plutonium no problem.

Swell. But most folks are not going to lug a lab bench geiger counter on an international trip. Or a 9,000 mile extension cord. Or know how to interpret the readings. In addition the alpha particles from Plutonium have a mean free path in air of about 2 centimeters, so waving around a pancake style sensor tells you nothing.

>All it takes is one cosmic ray, or one decay from an atom of phosphorous in a banana, etc. etc. Risk is proportional to dose. It's managable.

You seem to be ignorant of the effects of Plutonium ingestion. One nanogram of it emits 3 x 10^5 alphas per second, for the length of your life. The Phosphorus in a banana is way spread out. Cosmic rays come at you in random paths. Big diff.

>If we can estimate the exposure, we can calculate exactly how many people we'd expect to get cancer from such an expedition. Again risk is proportional to dose.

You miss the point-- we can't get an exposure reading from a geiger counter. the AVERAGE rad level, as indicated by a geiger counter, is useless information. The counter is not going to register the Plutonium a;lphas, as they don't travel far in air. There are thousands of acres of dusty countryside there, with skazillions of particles of Plutonium. The dust blows around and gets on your skin and into your lungs. There they become point sources of radiation. The namby-pamby average reading of a Geiger counter does not reflect this.

Touring Chernobyl is like walking across a freeway blindfolded, because it's okay, you can't hear any cars.

You see:

(1) The "Quiet Prius" prob: You basic inexpensive Geiger counter, for durability, has a thickish diaphragm over its sensor, which blocks alpha and beta radiation. The element of most concern is Plutonium, which is an Alpha emitter. So, as listening for traffic is not very efficacious at discerning quiet cars, a geiger counter is of no help, indeed, it's less than helpful.

(2) The "Quiet on the average" prob: It does not help that traffic sounds quiet. All it takes is one car to send you flying. Similarly, it does not matter that the radiation level is, on the average, low. All it takes is one particle of Plutonium, nestled against a lung cell, to start a cancer. The cell does not care that averaged over a day, over your whole body, you just picked up a millirad. All it knows is that an alpha particle just smashed into its DNA and caused a mutation. Yes, DNA has some self-repair mechanisms but they're not foolproof.

(3) The "Ivana made it okay" prob-- it does not matter that some dame allegedly snapped some pics years ago. She may be dead or dying now. Plus we will never know how many folks took a similar trip but are now too sick or too dead to post their pics.

(4) The "But Ivan made it across" prob-- It does not matter that your tour guide has been there a dozen times-- You don't know how many other guides are now in the Kiev Home for Comrades With Bad Coughs Who Eventually Keel Over.

Maybe the analogy isn't so bad. Think about whether you'd walk across a quiet freeway before you sign up for this trip.

Saw the ppt show. There's nothing there.

Just some very basic blather about encoding and redundancy.

Absolutely nothing new.

And AFAICT they have not done any actual DNA coding and decoding.

Perhaps they would have done everyone a service by actually estimating the time and cost of encoding/decoding 90GB.

Perhaps they left that part out as the numbers would be so dismal.

Back in 1990, I redid the Borland Pascal memory allocator so each block was given its own hardware-protected segment descriptor and length. Worked magnificently, as any reference outside a valid block would immediately fault. Only prob, you could only allocate about 4000 blocks as there were only 4,096 entries in the hardware segment table. So the next refinement was to allocate each block with short pre and postambles set to $12345678 and check thee for overwriting periodically. Worked almost as well, if not so immediately finding the errors.

And no, I did not try to patent this, as I knew the Burroughs machines, since 1961, allocated a fresh memory-protected segment for each array, and using pre and post safety zones sure sounded like an "obvious" thing to do..

Good Grief, what happened to, like, research?

I think Chinese Junks have been exceeding the wind speed for like, 5,000 years.

You can also analyze it as a glider by turning the world 90 degrees-- now you have a plane wing, which can have a glide ratio of up to 20-- that is, moving across (down) one unit while moving 20 units downrange (forward).

Why go hatin' on this particular protocol?

Most of them are just nuckin futs:

* FTP: needs two connections. Commands and responses and data are not synced in any way. No way to get a reliable list of files. No standard file listing format. No way to tell what files need ASCII and which need BIN mode. And probably more fubarskis.

* Telnet: The original handshake protocol is basically foobar-- the handshakes can go on forever. Several RFC patches did not help much. Basically the clients have to kinda cut off negotiations at some point and just guess what the other end can and will do.

* SMTP: You can't send a line with the word "From" as the first word? I'm not a typewriter? WTF?

Is it just me, or does this accident report seem to point out that NASA is a hugely bloated organization? Pages and pages just of signatures of guys in the chain of command. One Hundred Twenty Seven pages analyzing something about as complicated as a swing set. Seems about ten times as long as it should be.