Sharks with frikkin' lasers are old school. Be afraid of carp with particle beams! And I know that the real purpose of the NIF is bomb research but as a side effect it is still a good physics experiment. The only worry is that the results are always going to be filtered by security concerns so some results are going to vanish - this makes it trickier to use as a source of data but still good (rose tinted glasses? I hope not).

IMHO the NIF is a excellent tool in researching the properties of ultra dense materials be they fusable or not and is up there with CERN as a high energy physics lab and it covers bulk phenomena that CERN can never touch. I expect papers on Rayleigh–Taylor instability, neutron absorption cross sections and tests on the theoretical reaction probabilities/speeds of H,D fusion. But (and you all knew I was about to say that) this is a research tool on the subjects I just mentioned and many others not a step towards a fusion power source. This is a excellent research tool and I fully support it - just don't think of it as a proto-proto-proto type fusion power plant.

Smokers have to go outside to indulge - just a thought.

Personally I cant stand the long adverts at insane volumes pushed down the PA system of planes. Loads of 'buy our gifts' and 'this is our hire car partner' sometimes in several languages so this can go on for 10 minutes. Why is it always blasted out at ear bleeding volume? I would prefer phones, at least then you can complain to the noisy person and at least have a theoretical chance of peace.

"literally seen a brick received in a Dell laptop box"? Seriously?

MS-DOS 5, luxury! I worked with some clunky and unreliable WORM optical disks that only worked with DOS 4. That OS was so buggy that if you tried to access a missing floppy you had to reboot the machine.

It is a competition and he is using logic and statistics to use the optimal strategy - well done! He is actually teaching algorithms to anyone who is taking note. I have heard of a TV program somewhere which was a '20 questions' format to identify a word. someone did a binary chop search and had a guaranteed win - the program was cancelled. The shocking thing about this is that the people who planned the program did not realise that there was a trivial solution but they probably had degrees in something ending with studies. I remember the link to this but can't find it - annoying.

Batteries don't like the cold. This is inevitable and just physics/chemistry in action. If battery powered cars are going to work in cold conditions then then preheaters of the batteries will be required. For combustion based engines preheaters of the engine block are required but they do at least have the theoretical option of burning fuel to heat the engine upto a usable temperature. This is just something that battery based vehicles are going to have to deal with. If they need to have a feature to dump some power to heat things up then so be it - that is just the way that batteries are going to work but it is not a show stopper - just something that needs to be designed in.

The concept of 'magical undetectable matter' seems ludicrous from our day to day perspective but viewed from the point of view of physics it makes perfect sense. There are several forces (= ways for matter to interact). Not all forms of matter are affected by all these forces. For example neutrinos are oblivious to the electromagnetic and strong nuclear force which is why they can casually pass through what we think of as solid matter. Solid really means something that interacts with the electromagnetic force which holds particles together into what we call solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Neutrinos only interact with the weak nuclear force and gravity which is why they are so hard to detect - the weak force is puny and only rarely causes a neutrino to 'hit' something. To make 'dark matter' all that we need to postulate is a particle that does not even interact with the weak force. Such particles would be invisible and intangible to almost any sensor. There really is no reason to think that such a particle is impossible and given that it is so hard to make any measurements on it is not surprising that physicists are vague on the details.

plus a few more characters to say what 'AP Computer Science Test' is. Relevant links are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Asimov's New Guide to Science is a must read. The knowledge in that book is incredible.

Opened the shell and killed it in a flash

I suspect this is the starting material for a rock cam, I.E. a rock. Good luck with selling that.

I agree. This looks like of the the standard news scare stories where correlation is implicitly connected to whatever correlation is trendy at the time. Drinking coffee is correlated with so many things that it is almost impossible to correlate with any health effects. The same goes for green tea, water from expensive purifiers, beer, high income, low income, .....

Abuse of statistics can prove anything. Newspapers, blogs and dare I say it articles that get linked from slashdot are going to be prone to sensationalist statistics. The everyday headline science reports are mostly sensationalist rubbish written by journalists who care about the story not the science.