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In US jury trials, there are almost never any jurors really knowledgeable about the topic of the trial, if the topic is of any complexity. These candidate experts are reliably weeded by by peremptory challenges during the jury selection by the side with the weaker arguments.

This is a perennial problem with US patent trials with regular international repercussions: Every other civilized nation lets expert judges decide these trials, the US uses farmer jurors from certain Eastern Texas districts who are quick to slap foreign, un-American companies with ridiculous judgements.

with what the rest of the world uses, because they insist on custom non-metric sizes. Just like paper. There are many more Euro pallets in use than US-sized ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR-pallet

Though in this case, the US size may actually win in the long term, because standard containers are designed to accomodate US pallets optimally. The Euro variant does not fit as well. There is a slightly wider Euro container variant designed to play nicely with Euro pallets, but with ever increasing ocean-crossing container shipping, these are on the way out.

One problem of the smallest variant of the US pallet (35 × 45.5 inch Milspec, 40 × 48 standard type) is that is does not fit trough standard European doors (which are 850 mm - Euro pallets are 800 mm, US mil pallets are 889 mm on the smallest side, standard type even larger).

That is an obvious concern, but also one the examining scientists and their reviewers had... consensus seems to be that these concerns were properly addressed, at least in the later studies.

There are now over half a dozen carbon-containing meteorites where a (small) excess of L-amino acids was found, and none where the opposite enantiomer was found to be in excess. Since these meteorites where never in contact with the earth's biosphere (the samples were of course not scraped from the surface), the chance of an evolution of isolated systems into a random chiral direction is already pretty slim.

The weight of lithium is pretty irrelevant. There are no currently existing battery technologies where Li is more than 10% of the total weight of the battery, and standard battery types are significantly below that. If the active ion weight were the prime factor, there would be more interest in beryllium batteries (just 30% more weight vs. twice the charge per ion).

Most of the commercial launches want equatorial orbits, and for that you want to launch as near to the equator as possible. As far as polar orbits for research satellites are concerned there is already the Kiruna site, which is fully equipped and at a better location for monitoring polar orbits. Polar orbits for secret missions? Countries involved in this will want to launch from their own turf. And space tourism? Does not exist yet.

Has the editor actually understood the idea behind this?

"Das Erste" is a (major) TV broadcaster and its name roughly translates as "TV1". The fact that they also have a Web site which summarizes the content of previously broadcast features does not change this.

From all the possible names for a motorcycle, they felt they had to choose the one which is most likely to get them sued for trademark violation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bmw_C1

Covered and innovative motorcycle by BMW, in production 2000-2003.

Any safe worth its money cannot be harmed by a simple gas explosion in the surrounding house, tornado, car crashing though the walls, etc. and if you have one or two hours of fire protection, that also covers the vast majority of house fires.

Sapphire is *not* the second hardest material known. Yes, it's written in the linked article, but it is also definitely wrong. It is hard, and it is harder than glass. That is all there is. Besides diamond. many other materials, such as some forms of boronnitride, rhenium and osmium borides, and a collection of carbon/boron/nitrogen mixed compounds are all far harder than sapphire.

To those posters claiming that these are sensationalistic numbers, or fake statistics:

This problem is well known among professional chemists, and there have been a string of high-profile accidents in recent years (and very expensive settlements for involved universities as a result).

The ACS (American Chemical Society) has instituted a task force to guide academia in establishing a better safety culture..

See for example

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_10_02/caredit.a1300217
www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/governance/committees/chemicalsafety/academic-safety-culture-report-final-v2.pdf

From the article: "by the time she ran back into the bar, her purse with her keys, wallet and phone were gone".

Maybe this is what it all was about. A standard pickpocket distraction manoeuvre.

With laser lighting, illumination in rain can be dramatically improved, but avoiding to shine the laser onto rain drops.

http://iq.intel.com/iq/33831801/future-headlight-technology-could-make-rain-disappear

a) wrongly set system clocks leaking into page timestamps, etc.

b) conspirators communicating about/cashing in on their nefarious schemes