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Comment Melatonin (Score 1) 114

Melatonin supplements help prevent prion buildup / plaques. Symptoms like these can be triggered by neurotoxins added to smoke or vape products for example. Flush the prion buildup / plaques with melatonin and baby aspirin, both cross the blood brain barrier, one helping the other, there are rare papers out there on how melatonin appears to help. Suspect foul play.

Comment Re: Tobacco regulation, iffy constitutionally. (Score 1) 91

How about people that care for the health of their youth and know they can't delete their accounts so just want to fix facebook http://www.slate.com/articles/... Amid skyrocketing youth suicide? Yeah top Marks Mark if you enjoy killing people! Its your company and your New Years Resolution to fix Facebook. Try a subscription model and don't sell out the youth. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/n...

Comment Re: Global air conditioning (Score 1) 268

With respect to "green house" gases, perhaps capturing them in the buildings that we needed to insulate would be useful. The way insolation works, short wave radiation penetrates the troposphere and heats the terrain, which emits longer wave radiation which causes localised heating. If a reflective layer was employed in construction, the greenhouse gases could be put to good use in the malls and so on, first as insulation, later as useful gases...?

Comment Re: Global air conditioning (Score 1) 268

What's more ridiculous is that in many parts of the world during we are freezing, and use heaters and heatpumps (reverse cycle airconditioners) to keep warm. Maybe clothing technology should leap ahead (insulation and technology wise). We live on a planet with obesity and starvation, and heating and cooling epidemics... perhaps start engineering some long term solutions... Ice accretion and depletion and the water cycle would appear to be the planets natural governing mechanism, perhaps we should replicate it in some way...? Large or small scale. Astronaut have water circulation systems, divers use heating pads. We have humour but does it help the physics? What if we started each day in the heat with a frozen camelback and reflective layers, and better insulation in the cool... next generation clothing anyone?

Comment Re: Global air conditioning (Score 1) 268

Insulation can keep cool things cool as well as warm things warm. Inefficient insulations means energy spent to refrigerate a mall is wasted as the heat is transferred back to the mall. It's scary but we I really thing AC is a large part of the problem and continuing to do so. This post says 40% of power consumption in Mumbai is for air conditioning: http://www.usatoday.com/story/... and an undergrad doing some basic calculations I'm quoting here: "I have some basics doubts regarding how air conditioners and refrigerators work. I am putting one most basic pertinent doubt here (it has troubled my small brain for a long time now- please address it with a little patience): At the core of all AC’s is the basic refrigeration cycle: 1) There is the surroundings (label it ’1) with surrounding temperature (call T1). 2) There is the air conditioner in the interface which contains a compressor that takes in electricity to be run. 3) There is the place to be cooled (label it ’2) and we want its temperature to be T2 that would make our bodies comfortable. And no rocket science funda involved when I write that T1>T2. Now when I turn on the air conditioner and a little time later I see the following energy transfers taking place: a) Heat is being absorbed from place to be cooled. Call this Q2. b) Energy/Electricity is being fed to air conditioner. Call this W. c) Heat is being rejected to the surroundings. Q1. A little energy equation funda involved when I write that Q1=Q2+W. Is this right? So, Q1=Q2+W => Q1>Q2. That is heat being rejected to surroundings is greater than the heat that needed to be taken out of my room to make me feel at comfort. So, HERE comes my basic troubling doubt, the above implies that if there was a simple heat transfer to be taken place between my room, Q1 should have been = to Q2, which would have meant that temperature rise of surroundings would have been in accordance to M*C*deltaT equality. But since now, my Q1>Q2, means that deltaT1, the rise in surroundings temperature is greater than the proportional (by MCT euality) fall in room’s. And this is attributable to compressor work being converted into this additional heat. Now, multiply this effect by millions for the millions of AC’s and refrigerators working across the globe. And what you see is the overall temperature of surroundings rising further. (Which by the way makes us feel even hotter and pushes us further closed to our AC’s and thus the vicious circle). Wait a minute here Is something really horrible wrong here? Because in the first place I wanted to be cooled down a little, I bought an AC, and eventually that AC made the earth even hotter, forcing me to buy more AC’s?? Will the temperatures just go on rising?? ALSO, not taken into account in this explanation (my doubt rather) is the work W that is being fed to the AC. Where does that W aka electricity come from? Yes, the electricity plant- again efficiecny of about 30% burning of fossil fuels, more heating ever heating?? — Note to all the readers: Please understand that I am just a naive with small exposure to mechanics and thermodynamics of refrigeration and AC’s stuff. But this (the mammothic query above) has given me many a sleepless night Please if I am missing a basic truth, correct me. In any case, answer me. And enlighten me. Abundant Thanks." puts this in the limelight. We need better insulation, more efficient airconditioning, and we need to think carefully about airconditioner use particularly as its use skyrockets in the developing world, and it is being used to combat heat and also contributing to the problem...

Comment Global air conditioning (Score 1) 268

I'm in the Philippines at the monent and its 40 degrees celsius plus and all the malls and everything else seems to be airconditioned down to 22 degrees celsius or so. Could someone crunch the numbers of the global heating caused by air conditioning starting with their power consumption and efficiency for example? I'm thinking that insulation might be a better investment to prevent climate change because otherwise, what we are doing is expending huge amounts of energy to cool small sections (and thereby heating everything else) on a massive and unprecedented scale...

Submission + - What does NEST stand for? NeXT step in Sensor Technology... (kickstarter.com)

Ginsu2000 writes: Well, what do you think NEST stands for? I hear 3d cameras are coming to mobile phone and lemoptix just got VC funding for their mini-projectors for huds and mobile devices. Then theres pebblesinterfaces.com and their 35 million venture round. But what about guys doing more with less, that understand the market, do cutting edge research, and now propose a co-operative structure? From little old New Zealand comes RealWorld — "Reality Virtualised for the Real You" and if you support their vision, the NEST step may be the last step you need to make... This from a country where the largest company, Fonterra, is a co-operative, which produces something close to 30% of the world's dairy products and 70% of the world's dairy exports under various brands... Besides who doesn't want to be a Jedi or help create beautiful products that arn't evil or superfluous. What do you think?
Space

Submission + - Space currency to facilitate efficient innovation (youtube.com)

Ginsu2000 writes: "In keeping with the existing space exploration agreements suggesting no one country can nationalise space (although corporations may prospect) perhaps it is time to adopt a space currency which mitigates flaws in the existing price system. Much work has been done on energy accounting from pre war Technocracy, and I believe the kilowatt hour as a currency unit should be accepted between all space faring nations to satisfy space faring objectives. After all, efficient use of energy is key in scientific systems, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but simply change state. When all the worlds currencies are replaced with an energy equivalent we will no longer mark up innovation, or machine labour, or build things to throw away if one takes into account the energy required to create and recycle them.
Advertising and usury will take a hit, but in return the most efficient machines and processes will be adopted, and human endeavor will be marked up, as the human being although versatile is an inefficient machine.
Increased efficiency and energy consciousness could lead to a cleaner, greener Earth, as humanity works together to mine and explore the space frontier.
One model being tested is that at http://www.kilowattcards.com/"

Comment Re:Semi serious comment (Score 1) 160

We spend nine months in the womb, so why not fill the spacecraft with water. It sounds crazy at first, but water offers radiation protection including thermal protection, we can drink it, it makes good use of the empty space AND if the spacecraft is rotated slowly the centripetal acceleration of the water on the human body should mimic gravity. A 10m water column on earth is approximately two atmospheres, and long durations breathing at this pressure may require decompression however an appropriate sized water column slowly rotating in space should be exactly one atmosphere - no problem! It should mean that calcium won't leach from our bones, our bones won't pit or become brittle as is the normal case with pressurisation and microgravity, and we have viscous water, and artificial gravity to exercise against meaning our muscles won't waste away. Sure we need to make the spacecraft instrumentation waterproof, not that difficult, and we need to be able to breathe, but we could make an external gill or something like cave dwelling axelotyl, or make do with a rebreather. On Mars, same system just take refuge at the appropriate depth in the bottom of a watercolumn, and you won't need to spin it but will receive the same benefits! Let's try it- email pilotfever@gmail.com. On EVA consider a water presurised drysuit as the basis of a spacesuit. Put funky display units inside the helmets. Not all the spacecraft needs to be filled with water, have a submarine inspired airlock. Finish the job and include a Polywell derived IEC fusion and plasma propulsion system (that will get us to Mars in six weeks or less with a ionocraft inspired external hull for Earth based atmospheric propulsion).

Comment Re:Wrong market - Wrong target audience (Score 1) 202

I came up with this concept in 2002, anyone else? I suppose the reason for the 8 year lag is the competition between acceptable display rates and wireless standards. It was a component of a more user friendly functional network orientated operating system, the "TriAmp" concept I came up with in 1998, consisting of processor, input and output hardware. You simply redirect the video as easily as you would standard out to the appropriate device(s). Likewise for input(s).

Comment Re:Solving a different problem (Score 1) 394

Good point, this constraint is not kept in the case of the bee. Further, I have read that bees can communicate flying distances and directions very effectively between each other, and as such may infact be solving the problem collectively (or in a distributed fashion) in which case it's not just one bee crunching this problem.
Games

Originality Vs. Established IP In Games 71

Ten Ton Hammer has an article about the differences between developing a game based upon existing intellectual property and the creation of an entirely new story and setting. They make the point that while doing the former may result in an easier time building a fan base, those same fans will often be the hardest to please. "By creating a game based on a popular IP, the company in question has a huge responsibility to 'do it right.' Unfortunately, not everyone realizes the reality of one little secret — every single fan out there has a different idea of what 'right' is. ... Lord of the Rings is a perfect example. For a person that may be familiar with the movies and little else, it's a great game with an impressive amount of depth and attention to detail. For the mass of fanatical fans that have spent more time poring over every book Tolkien ever wrote than even Tolkien himself, any deviation from the lore of his world is paramount to sacrilege on the most horrific scale."

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