That's the SSID for my home wi-fi :-D.

The article actually explains that this behavior of the fungus controlling the ant has been ongoing for 48 million years. The slashdot summary does not even mention this as the key point.

hydrogen ions so the can be accelerated to high speed with very little power, then increase their gravitic mass until the inevitably fuse into a cloud of an atom with an atomic number and atomic mass in the zillions, then shut "the magic field" off and watch the giant atoms fission releasing considerable energy to their surroundings.

Duuuude!!! You have the kernel of an awesome SF novel here...what you describe seems to be the recipe for a "Big Bang" and the plot could involve a scientist trying to recreate the Big Bang and make a whole new universe.

No big surprise here...all kinds of crazy shit is possible at the quantum level. I would like to see this effect at the classical level.

I'm glad that that issue has now been settled. When do we start seeing extensive adoption of WebM and ditching of the H.264 and others?

[snark]...blocking the internet ultimately resulted in such an increase in work productivity that Pakistan shot to the top of the list of developed countries in record time! [/snark]

In a poor country with only a fraction of the people being affected by blocking the internet, the critical mass for any push for change is absent.

Isn't that why Mars is dry?

Better believe it - what with anthropogenic global warming and all...the water will all just boil away and earth will become one giant desert :-(. Just give it enough time, that's all.

Do they consider the effect of evaporation? Earth loses some of its atmosphere to space constantly and it's not too improbable that some water vapor is also lost in this way...

Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) set out to more accurately answer that question -- and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles.

So, what were the earlier estimates? I'm on Slashdot => I did not RTFA.

nt

There are some things you should never be able to forget - the definitions and meanings of probability, mean, median, standard deviation and variance come to mind. You find yourself in situations everyday where you need to apply some of these things. Am I wrong about this? Do people forget basic definitions so easily?

You are missing the point - he did not know what a standard deviation means! That is unforgivable for anyone with a medical degree...hell, it's unforgivable for anyone who has passed a course in statistics in school.

Standard deviation is what you learn very early in school. And this was a endocrinologist - a specialist who no doubt took a lot of Biostatistics courses and such, and used a lot of statistics all through his education. And you are telling me that it's not his "job" to know? Wow! We are talking the most basic stuff that anyone with a degree in the sciences should know. It's almost like saying that an English major can be excused if he doesn't know that 2+2=4 because "it's not his job to know".