I've always found that I can take notes, or understand, but I can't do both. Back when I was a student, i generally taken almost no notes - just perhaps half a page to a page in an hours lecture - just the key points and nothing else to act as reminders later. It always worked well for me - I seemed to be the only person who actually understood stuff.

Of course, revision for exams was interesting, but it really was revision, because I didn't have enough notes to attempt to learn anything during revision. Probably fits with the article - remembering during revision was hard, but once I had remembered, I really knew it well.

One of the most difficult parts of science is knowing what questions are worth answering. Coming up with a good question - one that is worth answering and can be answered - is often the hardest part of a PhD. Younger scientists generally have more difficulty with this than older scientists - it is something that you get better at with experience and with making a good network of people you interchange ideas with. But often younger scientists are (or rapidly become) better at the fine details when pointed in the right direction, but getting that direction in the first place is crucial. All this points to collaboration between people of different generations as being a very pretty effective way to have impact.

Interestingly, what Fukushima did show was that several pretty large explosions inside the reactor buildings didn't really cause damage to the reactor containment. So you're almost certainly right that a terrorist with a backpack bomb probably isn't actually going to cause a disaster.

Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if they shot protestors next time.

Sounds like the came very close to proving that no such hole existed - when you call ahead to tell the police not to shoot your guys, you're not proving much.

So now when the real terrorists break in, they just have to phone to warn the police that Greenpeace is breaking in?

By the time you're 20 you kinda get the plot, and it usually doesn't get any better after that.

I disagree strongly with that. I'm in my mid-40s, and so far I have to say that life has got better with each passing decade. Not necessily easier, mind you, but certainly better. My job has never been more interesting, and my kids are getting old enough to be not just fun but interesting to have deep discussions with. Perhaps most importantly, I know myself, my strengths and weaknesses better than I ever used to, I've got far more confidence than when I was younger, I'm happy with who I am, and I know how to apply myself and to work with the people around me to get stuff done.

Life is what you make of it. Whatever age you are.

The evidence from supernova 1987A seems to contradict this. Neutrinos from the supernova would have arrived years before the light if c were 0.03% faster than we measure on Earth. Instead they arrived a few hours earlier, which is to be expected, as light from the initial explosion took some time to emerge from the exploding star whereas the neutrinos did not.

A friend of mine who is a professor at a Romanian university mentioned to me that in Romania if you've a Computer Science degree and work as a programmer, you're exempt from paying income tax. No surprise that they've no shortage of smart CS graduates.

Oops, missed the transistor. That's Lilienfeld, a canadian. Shockley and the Bell labs team built some of their early transistors based on Lillienfeld's patent.

Well, the light bulb was Joseph Swan, an Englishman.

The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci, an Italian. Alexander Graham Bell, himself, was Scottish, though he'd been in the US for four years when he did his telephony work.

Velcro is Swiss.

The nuclear bomb, I'll give you, though of the key people on the Manhattan project, Fermi and Segre were Italian, Teller, Wigner and Szilard were Hungarian, Bohr was Danish, Frisch was Austrian, Block as Swiss, Fuchs, Peierls and Franck were German. But at least Oppenheimer, Bohm and the finance was American.

Packet Switching was independently invented by more than one person, including Donald Davies at NPL in the UK.

Many of the principles later used in TCP/IP including the basic datagram concept came from Louis Pouzin and the French CYCLADES network.

Of the original three TCP/IP implementations, one was done at University College London.

(Most of Europe then wasted a decade on the dead-end that was OSI, but history is written by the victors)

GSM was European.

The Web was European.

Skype was European.

Linux was European.

ARM is European.

I agree the successful big portal sites tend to be American - maybe related to having a large market that all speaks (almost) one language. But I just want to point out that the US does not have a monopoly on innovation.