As other posters have pointed out, the presitige of say Nature or Journal of American Medicine is very hard to match, let alone exceed. Prestige is not something you can just collectively decide to bestow. A given publication starts with a certain degree of respect/prestige when it is founded, based on the credentials of the founders. From there, it EARNS it's reputation over years, often decades of established track record. Trying to *choose* to accord prestige to a publication is like everyone deciding that, as of tomorrow, Joe Blow is going to be a world famous author and Generic Garage Band is going to be so well known that their next concert will be a sold out stadium venue.

Worse yet is the fact that, in academic publications, it's not the opinion of the authors that matters, nor is it, to a lessor extent, the opinion of the authors peers in that discipline that matters either. As others her have pointed out, publication is important for two reasons beyond the academic consideration of advancing the field. Being published in say Nature, matters for tenure and grant applications as well. It's the presitige of the publication of non-academics in the academic field that matters for those issues. You not only have to convince Professor Steamhead of the integrity of your Open publication, but convince the Dean of Steamology that a) Example Journal is as good prestige wise as Nature and b) This fact is already well established in that field, so all the other deans and grant board chairmen know this too.,/i>

THAT is the hard thing to establish, the near universal understanding and presumption that new and shiny Open Journal for Steamology is just as good as Proceedings of the Royal Society for Steamology which has been publishing for over 80 years.

there might not be much activity per se during a behind the scenes shop tour of your operation, but i can think of several things you could share with us nerds that we'd probably find interesting.:

1) how you generate the requirements for a medical device, the brainstorming period before you start actually working on materials 2) How you test a material for a particular application, why cobalt alloys might be used for a particular implant rather than titanium or surgical stainless steel. 3) Your projects are the kind of thing we hear about a few years down the road when device X gets approval for human applications, you could give us a sneak peek (intellectual property restrictions permitting) of the sort of thing you are working on now that mght be approved for human use in the near future. 4) Obviously most of your materials are valuable enough that you do a fair bit of waste recovery, but I imagine you or some of your employees still manage to come up with nifty little doo-dads out of scrap pieces. Cobalt alloys make for real pretty jewellry pieces. 5) what's the machiniblilty of alloys like vitallium like? Do you see any medical applications for stuff like metallic micro-lattice, aerogel or aerographite? 6) What device were you looking at that boralyn for? There's a surprising paucity of info on that alloy, mostly related to a single company's bike frame. 7) I think your shop would be interesting, but you say that there are other amazing shops out there, can you point us to some of them?

I once posted elsewhere about what *I* think would be great subjects for video.slashdot.org, behind the scenes at the computer room of a major observatory for example. I think getting a video tour of your shop might be equally fascinating. Exotic boron and/or titantium alloys and it's not an aerospace application? I'm guessing racing bicycles or Formula 1 fabrication work. Either way, I'd love to see an interview where you discuss what it's like working with these unusual materials.

Or Richard Kea AKA the Eternal Emperor of the Sten Chronicles, who was not a clone in the usual sense, since the mind was transcribed into each new body as well, so it was arguably the same man.

Making a rigid sphere to resist 1 atm differential is easy, the problem is making such a sphere that, when containing a vacuum, is light enough to weigh less then the total weight of air that the sphere displaces. If you can make such a rigid yet light container, you have the potential to create balloons with greater lift capacity than hydrogen filled gas-bags.

What vlm was saying is that the low weight and high strength of titanium makes it feasible (on paper) to create a thin foil sphere of titanium that encloses a vacuum, but such a structure would be so close to failure that it wouldn't be practical to construct it, even the lightest touch would cause the sphere to collapse.

(it occurs to me that even if you *could* build such a structure, it wouldn't contain a vacuum for very long anyway, as hydrogen and possibly helium would migrate through the foil and fill the void, negating any increase in lift the vacuum had provided)

I'm just guessing here, but I think what is going on is that the GP AC supports a hacking group that uses the initials CFC and taunting another group that is referred to by -A-. It's possible that -A- refers to the well known Anonymous group, but I doubt it. It is also possible that CFC is involved in the cybercrime case mentioned in TFA. One possible scenario is that -A- is believed to be responsible for the original crime and CFC is responsible for making a game out of passing tips to the police.

XKCD, Something Positive, Questionable Content, Sinfest and Gone with the Blastwave...

"value of the concept cannot be completely alien..."

by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) on Tuesday December 25, @11:39AM

Says the man spending Christmas morning with his computer, reading Slashdot instead of hanging out with fellow humans in the real world...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but researchers have been successfully cloning whole mammals like cats and sheep for some time now. It's been nine years since Dolly the sheep was cloned. I am not a biologist, but it seems to me that if we can clone one mammal, then the same broad set of techniques can be used to clone pretty much any other animal. If I recall correctly, to achieve the success of Dolly, the research team had to go through many, many attempts before achieving success, a failure rate which might not be acceptable for human cloning.

That assumes you are trying to clone a whole being of course. Cloning of organs or partial cloning of tissues should be rather easier to achieve.

As far as I'm concerned, human cloning can be treated as an accomplished fact, meaning it is now high time we started drafting ethical guidelines and legislative actions to limit the types of cloning we do. Cloning a new organ for you, or creating a clone you and your spouse wish to raise as your child is OK in my book (and most others I think) but creating an entire clone so you can harvest multiple organs or perform a brain transplant is, to me, a heinous and incredibly callous act. It requires that an individual be brought into this world solely for the purpose of being murdered and used as spare parts.

Yeah, sure, we don't know how to achieve that, not yet. But it is far from being science fiction at this point. Achieving that capability is just a matter of time.

what is this unity-lens-shopping of which you speak?

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and Gnome in Fallback mode because I still want Compiz and all that pretty desktop cube eye candy, but I still have all the default Unity crap still installed. Attempting to use the command you suggested (in simulate mode only because I don't want to make any real changes) gives me this result:

root@machine1:/home/User# dpkg --simulate --purge unity-lens-shopping dpkg: warning: there's no installed package matching unity-lens-shopping

Furthermore; browsing through Synaptic Package Manager reveals the following unity-lens-* packages:

unity-lens-applications (installed)

unity-lens-askubuntu (not installed)

unity-lens-files (installed)

unity-lens-github (not installed)

unity-lens-gwibber (not installed)

unity-lens-music (installed)

unity-lens-sshsearch (not installed)

unity-lens-video (installed)

unity-lens-vm (not installed)

unity-lens-wikipedia (not installed)

It's my understanding that unity-lens-shopping is part of 12.10 and later and also that it only effects people still using Unity and Dash.

Technically; the Korean war never ended, both sides are currently in an armistice, despite the fact that North Korea continues to commit provocative acts. Look up the sinking of the Cheonan sometime.

The accompanying picture to the article makes the find looks suspiciously like Mardi Gras beads. I know of the drunken revellers have bad aim, but I don't think anyone could have managed a toss of that magnitude!

I wasn't thinking so much of the graphite or lithium boiling as I was the carrier solvents commonly in aerosol lubricants. For example, I have two cans of lube spray in my toolbox. Jigaloo graphite spray and 3in1 Lithium grease spray. Both have carrier fluids I am pretty sure would boil off almost instantly in a vacuum*, so the lubricant wouldn't stay fluid long enough to wick its way into the threads.

If they can get the bolt to back out even a little bit, they could apply graphite or lithium in stick form, but from what I read in the article, the bolt is stuck in both directions.

* According the MSDS sheets, those are primarily acetone and propane or petroleum solvent and propane respectively

That leads me to an interesting question: Just how strong is capillary action in a vacuum? With the bolt blocking the hole, any lubricant has to have good wicking properties to get in around the threads. On the other hand, I'd imagine that anything with a low enough viscosity to wick well would also be something that would boil off pretty quickly in a vacuum. That would certainly rule out any of the aerosol graphite or lithium sprays.

I know there have been experiments that included capillary action in micro-gravity, astronauts playing with a globe of water and a straw for example. But as far as I know, all such experiments were in a pressurized, shirt sleeve environment. I'm not aware of any similar experiments with fluids in microgravity *and* vacuum.

Oh I dunno about that. It's been well established that large (in the astronomical sense) and dense rotating objects exhibit Frame Dragging . I believe that contractions and expansions of a stellar object are a possible source of Gravitational Waves

Putting those two effects together, it is easy to imagine that some change in the make up of the sun as it evolves can also affect the nature of the gravity well around it.