Plus some Fortran[year] for numerical applications.

[ ] a planet
[ ] a plutoid
[ ] a bitch

Say "what" one more goddamned time...

Mars is a chocolate bar, Pluto is Mickey Mouse's dog. On Jupiter, Wikipedia has a lengthy disambiguation list. Take your pic.

On top of these points I would like to add scale-up. Being able to produce an improved button-sized battery won't cut it. You'll need tons and tons of the new material, which means a stable and efficient production line is needed. And, of course, you'll need to develop and build said production line, which is something that the lab-rats often just wave their hands over, dismissing it as engineering "details".

You might want to check out Stanislaw Lem's "His master's voice". He writes about the futile attempts of humanity in decoding an alien signal sent to earth, not only because of the difficulty of the encoding itself, but also due to the chasm between the two civilizations, mindsets etc. It is very dark and pessimistic, but definitely a good read.

If this isn't the insult of the week, I don't know what is!

You'll have to acknowledge though that in the rest of the "western" world religion and science are kept nice and separate. For example, debates on whether kids at school should learn about the genesis or evolution are very, very seldom. They are both taught at school, one at religion class and the other at biology class. People do go to church, pray etc. but they also know that this has nothing to do with science.

I think he's just going for the Ig Noble prize.

Chemical engineer here. The industry prices for electricity have become so low that it doesn't even make sense to heat up the reactors using turbine-generated steam any more. It's ridiculous. It's cheaper to buy the electricity to generate the steam!

So when a multinational company is pulling a Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich the court judge will look upon them extremely unfavorably? Let's face it: it all boils down to the depth of your pockets and the impudence of your lawyers.

Indeed. But you should get a Purple Heart if the jihadists abducted you and forced you to write Perl scripts for them! We are talking about some major trauma here...

I see you can use Google. You might want to check out "catalyst poisoning" while you're at it.

The only advantage of a smartwatch over a smartphone is that it can't be that easily stolen/lost/broken. I would therefore like it to take over more critical functions that, however, require a minimum of interaction with the smartwatch. Have it automatically unlock/lock my house/car using proximity sensors, for example. Of course it should provide all sorts of time-telling functions, like time-zone conversion and it should have calendar reminders. It should be 100% waterproof so I can wash my hands without having to take it off. Did I mention that the battery should last for at least a year? Don't bother with anything inferior than that.

It is almost precisely what you make it to be.