The relatively close proximity of Homo florsiensis remains (Indonesia) and the supposed-partly-descended-from-Denisovans modern population (Melanesia) leads me to speculate that H. floresiensis and Denisovans might be the same. Undoubtedly we'll find out in due course. The big problem is the distance between Indonesia and Siberia - if the (sub)species was so wide spread, we'd expect to have many more remains in between.

The world of human genetics, according to Svante Pääbo*:
A first wave of humans left Africa on the order of half a million years ago. These lead to the Neandertals and probably the Denisovans. (But perhaps the Denisovans were a separate migration.)
On the order of 100,000 years ago, modern humans left Africa. On the way, they did a little interbreeding with Neandertals, so that all modern non-Africans are about 4% Neandertal by descent.
A subpopulation of these interbred with the Denisovans, and this subpopulation ended up in Melanesia, but somehow left no genetic trace between there and Siberia where the Denisovan finger was found.

I see very little similarity between this and the 19th century 'racial science'. If you insist on dividing people up into categories, this research has three categories, as do *some* of the 19th century schemes, and one of those categories is African. That really is as far as the resemblance goes.

* Errors are mine, not Prof Pääbo's. Dates are from other sources and from my memory.

Author of my all-time favourite book "To Say Nothing of The Dog", a Victorian-comedy-mystery-time travel novel. Other notably good works include Passage, Doomsday Book, Bellwether and Blackout/All Clear. However, as a multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner, she does have a fair bit of appreciation.

Teenage pilots are required because, as has been well established, mecha are powered by angst. Any organization which operates mecha also has a secret division of agents who mess with the pilot's lives to ensure they remain sufficiently angsty.

Had the superconducting supercolider (SSC) been completed in the USA in the 1990s, would it have found this particle? Even with a 20 year technology advantage, LHC has taken some time to get there.

You are right. Neandertal DNA must be at least about 30,000 years old for a start. As I'm not at a university now, I can't check the full paper, but the abstract makes no claim to 'oldest', so this may be a stuff-up by an over-enthusiastic university publicity hack. The paper does claim a full mitochondrial genome, and I'm unaware of whether the older DNA sequences are complete, so maybe this is the seed from which the excessive claim grew.

Yes, but in science we still test what we expect to be true. Also, I'm sure that the '% difference from humans' number was not the primary goal of this research, just an easy and interesting number to calculate once you have the data for other purposes.

Rates of genetic evolution can vary along different lineages, so it is possible that since the Bonobo/Chimp split, one had evolved faster than the other. It would have been surprising, however, for the rates to be substantially different after such a short time.

I'm just wondering whether my taxes are going to end up contributing to potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of damages should Megaupload sue the NZ government. Although I haven't heard that they have such plans, it seems a real possibility. A thriving business was destroyed, and the legal foundation for doing this is looking ever shakier.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Can you give me even one example where this is so? All the genetic engineering I'm aware of involves inserting one or more entire genes from another (usually very distantly related) organism. (And they do stuff with the promoter regions for the genes, but I'm not so certain about what the story is there.)

Indeed. It is pretty much a lost battle for us convincing the rest of the world. Primary blame goes to the people who made the marketing decision to rename the "Chinese goosebury" to "kiwifruit". This was entirely predictable, had they thought about it.

I remember when I was in the USA and someone asked me if we ate a lot of kiwis in NZ. I was horrified and explained they were a protected species. It took a while for us to understand each other.

Isolated clusters of galaxies (such as the local group) are expected to have low total angular momentum (basically because the initial condition has low angular momentum, and in the absence of large mass anisotropy nearby, there is nothing to change this.) The mass of the local group is dominated by Andromeda and us, and hence so is the angular momentum. If the us/Andromeda pair has low angular momentum about their centre of mass (and given the pair is gravitationally bound), they will both pass close to that centre of mass - i.e., they will collide.

Of course, having an actual measurment is much more satisfying than having a theory.

Also - although they can be spectacular from outside, galactic collisions aren't expected to have bad results for life living on their planets. The biggest effect is that colliding dust clouds trigger a burst of star formation, so the night sky will be pretty.

It has been a few decades since I studied this, so I hope this is all accurate.

Another problem I've complained about in the past is rebus icons. I once used a source control system where the icon to commit a change had a document page with a tick mark and an arrow pointing at the page. I'd been using it for several years before I realized what it was supposed to represent - Americans call a tick mark a 'check', so this was the 'document check-in' button. At which point I also realized the same applied to an email client which had an icon with an ticked envelope - 'check mail'.

So, icons were supposed to be language independent, but instead in these examples they only made sense in one particular dialect.

I also have a problem with Swedish appliances (washing machines, ovens) which have indecypherable icons for the various modes, and the manual has invariably been lost years ago. If they just labeled the modes in Swedish, at least I'd be able to look up the meanings online.

In these judgement calls, I expect there is another piece to the equation, at least in the USA.

If you don't order a scan, and there was something bad which the scan might have picked up, you get sued.

If you do order a scan, find nothing, but scan results in the patient getting cancer 15 years from now, you don't get sued, as there is no way to know that it was your scan which triggered the cancer.

You say that like it is a long time. This is going at light speed compared to the SCO saga.

No, I'm worried about what happens AFTER the fuel dumps into the emergency storage tanks. It just keeps heating, unless something cools it.

OK, I've just done some research: http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/469120-avNXWz/webviewable/469120.pdf
It seems that they're constantly removing the fission products from the fuel, so there simply isn't enough 'after heat' to cause a problem for the cooling of the dump tanks.

I am worried that in normal operation there is a lot of very radioactive stuff being pumped around, controlled by valves, and chemically processed. I'm therefore expecting quite a lot of complex equipment in regions far too radioactive for human maintenance.