Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.

Some day soon, in some areas, there will be enough solar to handle most power needs at peak insolation. When that happens, we'll have significantly cheaper grid power in the day than during the night. Then we'll see how much of the balancing water can do and if batteries can outcompete gas for the rest.

If you have a source of melting fresh water, water around it will be slightly higher as long as the melting continues, as it takes time for the meltoff to mix with the rest of the ocean. It's just a 2mm difference over maybe a thousand km of sea (which is why the intuitive "should immediately even out" idea doesn't work) so I doubt you could make the same effect visible in a bathtub.

Apps request permissions for different pieces of hardware on a case-by-case basis. The average user might raise some eyebrows if an app that shouldn't need it wants to access your microphone, but access to gyroscope data might not even require user acceptance.

I'm quite certain they named it after the sound it made when it first erupted.

As long as it's cold enough, how cold doesn't matter. Why wouldn't that make sense?

Woit has written a book called "Not even wrong" about string theory and how it's not science in his opinion. He actively blogs about string theory hype. He's not a string theorist and although he does have a PhD in physics he's not published anything scientific in decades. He teaches math and writes anti-string rants as a hobby.

This is a pretty small upgrade from the LEP that used to be in the current LCH tunnel. That went up to 209 GeV and ruled out Higgs masses up to 115 GeV. The Higgs is around 125 Gev, or 9% higher, and the energy of this is supposed to be 240 GeV, or 15% higher.

That makes me wonder if the planned energy is enough for a useful Higgs factory. The ILC is supposed to do 500 GeV and would work well as a Higgs factory. That proposal would be more than twice as expensive though.

It's of course possible the article has it wrong and it's really 240 GeV per beam, adding up to 480.

I've been laughing at this (pdf) for days now. The lower right pic on the second page gets me every time.

Ironically, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

An article by Matt Strassler that should explain more. In particular, this pic

The story about our vacuum having two 'valleys' depends crucially on no new physics existing beyond the already known fields, which is probably false.

"equations used to describe the distribution of genes", meaning the algorithm (mechanism) was probably unknown while the equations just described the end result. Also, the behavior of an algorithm that sees lots of use has probably been studied a lot so there's a treasure trove of material for researchers to dig through to find stuff relevant for genetics.

A month from now you'll be looking proudly at the one in your yard going "Well I'll be damned"

But almost no animal species alive in the past have survived all the climate changes in the past.

More seriously, they want to optimize meat per dollar taking into account projections of future climate. A current cow would probably do well but be suboptimal. Normal economics at work, nothing to see here.

I demand proof in the form of a youtube video of your laser!

Yes, the wealthy love their country more then the poor do, exactly proportionally to the wealth they have. One dollar, one vote!