Slashdot just trolled you all. Actually they are all lame today, but at least i laughed at how lame this was, and how trolled you were!

where have all the shark comments gone?

because on Mars you may have reasonable gravity to live out your life without muscle waste. On the moon you do not.

it's also a highly reflective photo, add immeasurably to the scientific value as the sun is DIRECTLY overhead.

yes, very confusing, because astronomers then also call iron a "heavy metal". Not the best when they are trying to communicate this to the general public..

I am the father of 3 beautiful daughters from my wonderful wife, and I see it as my responsibility to manage birth control. I don't like my wife using the pill as it effects her emotionally and physically too much each cycle - she hasn't touched the pill in 14 years. And she loves it that I take initiative here.
I am not sad for my gender, i am just sad for women who never meet a man who would respect her.

Except for a Tesla!

In the past humans needed to work hard to produce enough food to survive. Today machines assist humans in producing food. Eventually when robots can produce enough food for humans the game changes because no human will need to do work to survive. Perhaps humans can then focus on making the planet liveable, instead of exploiting it to build robots to make food. I am optimistic about the future. We could find ourselves heading towards a more "primitive" lifestyle of discovery, art, music, creativity and care of nature - and we find value in being part of creation and interacting with what we love and value, not an exploiter of it.

Ongoing GCHQ & MI5 operations in December 2014 are not related to this info. This is out of date info thrown into the public arena to gain political support for new policies, that will cover what they are really after.

As Elon Musk says MANY times fuel is only 10% or less of the cost of a launch, and as he says MANY times no-one would throw away a Boeing 747 after each flight as it is too expensive.
He takes extra fuel for the landing - this means he can only launch a lighter cargo, but he can one day reuse his rocket again, so it is worth it.
The last Falcon 9 flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... did not attempt a landing because it took a cargo of 2,216 kilograms (4,885 lb). The last flight which attempted a landing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F..., only had 1000 kg payload.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... will be able to lift up to 53,000 kg and land again because it is 3 Falcon-9s strapped together.

Why are you encouraging water pollution? That is part of the problem.

I think we will experience a renaissance of personal creativity when AI automates all of the non-creative jobs. The twentieth century was an era of global businesses pushing their uniform products on mindless consumers. I would like to believe that the 21st century will be more colorful, individualized, personal and creative, with people doing interesting and satisfying work, because they are doing it for themselves and their families, not the corporate übermonster.
Life is definitely better than 100 years ago - people have better human rights, more food, better health, smaller families, and increased longevity - also in the developing world. And I think 100 years from now it can get even better, especially if renewable energy democratizes energy sources - removing the source of most global conflict of the last century, if people can get their (probably lower than today) energy needs sourced form their own creativity and ingenuity, rather than drinking energy from the corporate hosepipe as a mindless, paying consumer.

There have been recent changes in the polar vortices, but meteorologists aren't prepared to make definitive statesments until they get better long term data, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P..., but it wouldn't surprise me if these vortices mess around with atmospheric energy equilibria across all the seasons.

By "western society", I think you mean the society that created REAL HEALTH PROBLEMS like aerial nuclear tests, mustard gas, smog, lead poisoning, chlorofluorocarbons, acid rain and other things that needed banning. This process is ongoing, and the benefits are for all. Go and look at asthma statistics for Los Angeles since 1970...
You can sit back smugly and wait for the millions of refugees to descend on Europe from Subsaharan Africa and Central/Southern America as their homelands become more arid, driving them north, or watch as global fishery catches dive because of eutrophication and ocean acidification.
This is no fiction - already these are burning issues in America and EU this year.

Forget your apocalyptic scenarios - there have been many environmental problems of the past that we fixed because they made people sick, and now we need to fix the environmental problems that are making people hungry and killing sealife.
Westen Society has done IMMENSE damage to the planet,eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G..., , and we need to keep finding, preventing and fixing these problems.
When talking about fracking, people almost always IGNORE the fact that they are pumping masses of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... into the ground, without taking responsibility for the consequences. Be assured that the next few generations will be cursing yours for that and filling the earth's orbital space with 300,000+ pieces of junk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S....

There is no "business as usual", we all need to be acting responsibly for our own health and others.

One of the consequences of Newton's Law of Gravity is that a spherically even distribution of matter behaves gravitationally as if it were all at the center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.... If you are INSIDE that sphere then you can IGNORE mass that is above you. Ie if you are in a hole 2000km into the earth you can ignore the outer 2000km of the earth. And so when you reach the center of the Earth you can ignore the Earth's gravity.


If you now apply this to Dark Matter and ASSUME that the Dark Matter in our part of the galaxy is evenly distributed then its gravitation effect upon is is effectively zero (or insignificant in terms of the Sun's effect on us). That is why we are unlikely to be able to measure local Dark Matter's effect on us, it is better to look outside of a Galaxy where it is less "spherical" or comparable to baryonic matter's influence
Also, since the baryonic matter INSIDE our solar system has MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE of density higher than the Dark Matter INSIDE our solar system, Dark Matter is completely irrelevant for the orbits of solar planets, moons, etc..