I am a scientist. I have a choice. When a government organization I don't like comes to me for help I can either
ensure that organization gets good advice or I can refuse to help and risk that they're going to get bad advice. If no one "good" agrees to help, we're collectively ensuring they get bad advice. This is OUR government, why would we want that?

For a moral scientist or engineer, the clear correct choice is to help the government make good decisions. "Help" may mean convincing the government NOT to go down some technological path. He's giving up a chance to help direct DoD efforts in this area toward, for example, disaster relief.

"Helping the government" in some rare cases may mean exposing abuse or corruption, it's not always warm and fuzzy. That's not the case here. He's just abdicating responsibility for his work.

They may be cutting off federal highway funding... it's a good thing the TSA is funded separately, otherwise who would randomly patrol our highways?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-coming-to-a-highway-near-you/

I think I read about this 20 years ago, during the first graphene boom, back when all it was used for was STM studies of carbon on metallic surfaces.

Well, we've come full circle on graphene then, what's next?

As much as a ship like the Enterprise is important to the Navy (and it's hard to find one which is more important to the modern Navy), what is truly amazing about modern carriers are the way the people on them work together.

If you ever have a chance to cruise on a carrier, go for it. Watching launch and recovery of planes is amazing, particularly at night. People die if someone makes a small mistake, stands in the wrong place, leaves a tool or spare nut lying around, or sets the pressure on an arresting cable just a little off. So they don't do anything wrong. Several hundred people working together flawlessly is really something to see.

Criticizing the water use of grain crops is sure to get a rise out of midwesterners.

I would never imagine that someone would claim that a professor of water management in the Netherlands needed to learn more about water in earth science. That is highly entertaining, thank you.

If you're good at something, enough that someone will pay you to do it, then go for it.

We need some people with the "hacker" mentality, they're like the blueberries in a blueberry muffin. Sure, you can make a muffin without them, but it's just not going to be as good.

The simple translation of this article is:
"We made really bad nanowires."

All that's necessary to demonstrate this effect is to create a system with enough defects and scattering (aka doping) to make scattering based resistance much larger than quantum resistance. This isn't something I thought was still under debate.

It may not be marketable (and may date me a bit), but my HS programming class was in BASIC, and the final was to make a game. I don't know what the equivalent would be today (java?), but it was quite useful learning the basics of good programming first and getting an idea of what was easy and what was hard in writing software.

I don't know that a workshop is going to do that.

Definitely don't do this at home. Cadmium Selenide is not something you really want to be around if you're not in a lab environment. I would feel fine having undergraduates working in a lab do this, but I wouldn't demo it at a high school, for example.

If you do want to build a solar cell like this at home, try the raspberry solar cell (google it). Very simple to build, uses more common ingredients and tools, doesn't put out as much power, but still educational and fun.

Is this an article or an ad for this company? I hope Slashdot made some money on this one, because there's nothing to this story other than the company name.

Wait, I just told you the guys writing about graphene oxide are misleading you, and your response is that I should read their article? Think about that for a minute.

I am a graphene researcher. I've published my own papers on these materials. I've done my own measurements. The resistance, carrier mobility, noise power and chemical reactivity of reduced graphene oxide is not the same as graphene. That's what their data says too, the press release text from Nature doesn't matter.

Graphene oxide and graphene are two different materials. As different as iron and rust, particularly in electrical properties.

This deliberate misleading of people outside the field by nanotechnology researchers is a major problem and has been for several years.

If we restrict activities in public spaces only to those we approve of, are they still public spaces?

In the Nature blurb, there's a bit of discussion at the end that quantum states might all be linked, entangled or not.

In most physics classes, you learn quantum mechanics by calculating the interactions between isolated states. This thought process is natural and useful for certain areas of physics, but you end up worrying about hidden variables and how particles which are essentially in different universes can possibly communicate. This view does not need the wave function to be real, it can just be a statistical tool.

An alternative way of thinking about things is the idea that there are no isolated states (and no measurement apparatus which can exist outside the quantum system). From that point of view, one wave function is sufficient to describe the entire universe, traced back to the big bang. You don't need to worry about spooky action, everything obeys causality just fine assuming the wave function is real. There are some cosmological issues still, and it's not clear such a unified state is possible in an infinite universe.

At least we're starting to all agree wave functions are real and not just a statistical tool.

Can we believe in climate change, but still be pissed at the climate scientists? It's very strange to tell the world there is a big problem and tell your peers that you need more money for models because you can't trust your simulations yet.

When this was gathering scientific steam in the mid 90s, instead of immediately recommending alternative energy research, climate scientists recommended more climate research. They allowed their field to become politicized and failed to act as "honest brokers" for society. There was a decade when it was much easier to get a grant to create a climate model than it was to get one to work on new solar cell techniques, even though we all (all being most scientists) knew we needed the solar cells more than the climate models. (We only needed more climate models because the climate scientists were in charge of the climate change discussion and emphasized the uncertainty in their existing models.)

As scientists, the lesson here is that the general public is not dumb. You should not claim to have proven something to one group of people and claim to be completely unsure to another.