In all of the instances I can think of in which bridges collapse or shuttles explode, it is precisely the engineers that warned against faulty materials, etc. It is always upper management that brushes the warnings under the rug, and continues on in order to keep budget/schedule.
Why? How does that benefit them in any way? It's not like they will be making more money. That's just mind blowing.
It doesn't matter. The amount of energy dissipated to air friction depends on the square of the velocity and is approximately linear in surface area, whereas the energy lost to accelerating fuel grows exponentially with mass. As long as the lift mass is large enough, a properly designed railgun will be more efficient. Most likely, that minimum mass is not very large.
Ever notice that anytime some researcher claims a cool sounding new development will have applications in/within/in about five years, someone says 'Call me when you actually have something to show us.'?
Some of us actually like hearing about basic research, and not just the latest gadget I'm supposed to go buy.
Unless she wants to go to college...
Who gets to define "intelligence?"
Society.
Except special relativity actually requires the true mass to increase when the speed increases. Mass/Energy is still conserved because energy is converted into mass (E=mc^2).
The effect described in the article is quantum mechanical in nature. In fact, the mass of the electrons is not changing. Only the "effective mass" is changing. Well, it turns out the effective mass is just an approximation we use to make the problem tractable. Basically, we look at the band structure in the material, and calculate an effective mass based on the curvature. If there is no curvature, such as in graphene, then there is no effective mass. However, the band structure for carbon nanotubes does have curvature, and therefor there is a finite effective mass. When the article talks about rolling graphene into nanotubes, they mean as a thought experiment. No one is actually sitting there with an atomic force microscope trying to roll a sheet of graphene into a carbon nanotube. So really, the paper brings nothing new. We already knew that there was zero effective mass in graphene, and finite effective mass in carbon nanotubes. Most likely, they are just suggesting a corollary to some other part of theoretical physics.
The whole problem with the "the universe is a simulation" gig is that it doesn't answer any questions or solve any problems. It's just one more turtle on the stack. Sure, it might be true, Occam's Razor says it's not very likely.
A commenter posted something on here a few months ago that I thought was extremely insightful:
Any chain of logic (or causality) must either extend forever and ever, or stop at something that just 'is', and both options are nonsensical. (This is equally true whether or not any of the links in the chain are God)." - Slashdot comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1774738&cid=33449910 by http://slashdot.org/~timeOday
The real problem is that Facebook is only free on the surface. There is a cost to using it, namely giving up your privacy. However, there is also a large social cost to not using it. I try to walk the line, and keep as little presence as is necessary, without sacrificing my privacy. Unfortunately, with Zuckerberg's insistence that privacy is a overrated, this is becoming more and more difficult.
IANAD, but as far as I am aware, the general idea with bacteriophage treatment would be to create a cocktail of several different strains, similar to how flu vaccines are actually a cocktail of several different strains. So, you would take a cocktail with a 90% chance of curing your infection, if it didn't work, you would resort to antibiotics.
"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong." -- Norm Schryer