Aehm, you did it to yourself?

What probably can be generalized is that only a minority refuses clearly unethical (some may say evil) orders from authority, as long as there is at least some, with Milgram not very large, force behind these orders.

Probably one of the reasons totalitarianism raises its ugly head time and again (and it is well on its way in the west this time): There are just too many participants that can be recruited with minimal effort and they tend to pile up. Humans are mostly still cavemen.

Your fact happens to be bunk because it ignores necessary details. Sure, Biology, Sociology, Gender Studies, Architecture and such often have more women, but that does not make a real-world "50% in the sciences". For example in architecture, I just recently talked to a PhD Construction Engineer (female, and not bad looking either) and she said that her reason to switch over from Architecture after a few weeks were all the very "special" women in there. (She did not say "stupid", but it was strongly implied.) What you find when you actually look is that the "50% women in sciences" (where they exist) are in soft subjects or subjects where a soft path exists and mostly/completely nonscientific subjects (gender studies, education "sciences", etc.) and really, that does not count. Show me some country where female EEs, computer scientists, Physicists, Mathematicians, etc. make 50% of the students, and we can talk again. (Yes, I know some women in all of these disciplines, several of them with PhDs. They do exist. But they are a minority and will remain so.)

Same here. These "studies" often are not much more than the condensed prejudices of their authors. The better ones at least usually only tricked themselves by faulty methodology.

Seriously, you do not think women have free will and think manipulating them into something they do not want to do just to fix a statistic is acceptable?

Or garbage-disposal persons and sewer-cleaners. It is high time this blatantly sexist imbalance gets addressed.

Its not that simple. You can't just recover it from nuclear reactor waste because it's mixed in with other isotopes of plutonium, and isn't in that great of quantities to begin with. So first off you have to reprocess nuclear waste to extract the neptunium - which again, itself isn't in very great quantities, it takes a lot of waste, and most places don't want to do waste reprocessing to begin with due to cost and liability issues. You then have to make neptunium targets and expose them to a neutron flux - that is, using neutronicity that could otherwise be used for power generation or other valuable purposes (it takes a lot of neutrons to make a tiny bit of Pu238). Pu238 should be more thought of as a manufactured product than as a byproduct of particular types of nuclear reactors.

There are a few other candidates for use as space power sources that actually are waste products, but they're all significantly worse performers. There are two other alternatives. One is to make a Sterling RTG, which was in development, but funding has been cut off (it's also kind of tricky because you have to ensure that something with moving parts will operate for decades in the harsh environment of space). The other is to make an actual nuclear reactor. This means almost limitless power, but it comes at the expense of not only massive development costs and public opposition, but a large minimum size and massive radiator requirements, as well as the same reliability challenges of sterling generators.

There's no easy solutions. Except, of course, to stop bloody wasting plutonium once we have it.

Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.

I hate to be the one to tell you but academia generally pays poorly outside of the US. More so in a country like Russia that is still clawing its way back up from the economic collapse that occurred during the transition from communism to capitalism.

Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.

You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.