How prevalent are industrial bitcoin mining operations? That is - people setting up racks of optimized servers that only run when the very lowest electricity rates are available. Does anyone know anything about this? Such an operation would not seek to hold bitcoins. but merely produce them and cash them in to collect pay the bills and make a profit in conventional currency. Of course the could hold their bitcoins, but that would be combining a separate line of business with the mining.

If the cost per bitcoin some are estimating here (~$30) is correct then this would be a compelling business opportunity. Once the servers are paid for, a crash in bitcoin value only leads one to turn the servers off until the value rises again (making running them profitable), much like oil wells that only produce when oil prices are high.

You are really this desperate to defend G. W. Bush's legacy as President? You realize that you are in effect attempting to argue that a screw-up by the French military proves that Bush is not the most incompetent person in the world. Quite apart of the logical fallacy involved here, this is just an amazingly low bar to set for Bush to clear. From a purely PR (aka "spin") aspect you should rethink your strategy here.

Gosh. Another AC who - without reading the article - knows the true obvious answer that all those Nobel laureate were to dense to see.

If you bothered to read it you would see that the fact that positrons can be emitted by other sources is precisely why they are not calling this a signature of dark matter yet. You would also see that your "explanation" holds not a single drop of water - the positron flux detected is omnidirectional and does not vary with time ruling out any sources local to the solar system, much less the Earth, as a significant contributor.

You should move on to explaining other great mysteries of science, but of course without reading anything about them first.

Did you actually read the section of the article you linked to? If you did you would have read this: "If one is willing to pay $300/kg for uranium, there is a vast quantity available in the ocean. It is worth noting that since fuel cost only amounts to a small fraction of nuclear energy total cost per kWh, and raw uranium price also constitutes a small fraction of total fuel costs, such an increase on uranium prices wouldn’t involve a very significant increase in the total cost per kWh produced."

How much uranium is in seawater? 4.6 billion tons, roughly one hundred thousand times current annual consumption.

How much can we afford to pay for uranium without driving up the cost of nuclear power significantly? Well, in a year 2.7*10^12 kwh of nuclear powered electricity are produced, with a value of something like 270 billion dollars (assuming an average price of $0.10 or so). To produce this 50,000 tons of uranium are consumed, or about $5000 worth of electricity per kilogram. Looks like paying $300 per kilogram for uranium is unlikely to seriously inconvenience the nuclear power industry.

A lazy and ignorant comment.

You don't know anything about Richard Garwin, clearly. Nor do you understand how Federal funds are allocated. I could go on but that is already a lot of stupidity packed into one sentence.

Richard Garwin is the most distinguished defense scientist in the U.S., and provides scientific advice to the government (like the advice quoted in TFA). At age 85 he is unlikely to be cooking up any billion dollar projects of his own.

What?! The evidence is consistent with Neanderthal men being welcome in Anatomically Modern Human society, but not Neanderthal women!

This is exaggerating the evidence of social unit size differences. Neanderthal sites are smaller, but the Cromagnon sites are quite small also. It is the difference of an average group of 10 and an average group of 20. Extrapolating to major differences in social skills seems unwarranted.

Indeed theories that hold the reverse (that Neanderthals were in some way significantly inferior to modern humans) are actually difficult to support convincingly. Neanderthal sites are far more similar to contemporary H. s. sapiens sites than they are different, and differences that can be well supported are not generally good evidence of any sort of inferiority. The technical skills and tools and social practices of Neanderthals and modern humans are virtually identical for the same time periods. The implicit assumption of inferiority has long permeated and contaminated the interpretations of Neanderthal archaeology.

This is a theory we know is wrong. If it were true there would be lots of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (passed on by the mother to her daughters) in the modern human population. Instead there is none (http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947).

This is an outdated theory (I used to like it myself though). There is evidence of gene flow between H. s. sapiens and H. s. neanderthalensis, but not very much. Theories that modern humans simply outbred them and replaced them are viable, but not ones that propose that the two species interbred to form a new single hybrid.

Consider this recent article: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947 .

A key quote: "Although mitochondrial DNA from multiple Neandertals has shown that Neandertals fall outside the range of modern human variation, low-levels of gene flow cannot be excluded." In other words we definitely are not them, but may (probably do) have some of their genes.

It is all about verifiable, repeatable experiments - Oh Anonymous Moron.

Tell me how those N-Rays are working out for you. (Google it.)

You are right to point out the quibble of "no time to train the crew" is straining at a gnat.

But you are having some trouble in trying to swallow the camel. Project Apollo cost $200 billion in current dollars to solve a much easier problem (an 8 day trip) compared to a year-and-a-half trip with an enormously larger delta-vee requirement (if you come back). Perhaps, in a similar national level high priority crash project, like the U.S. undertook in the "space race" it could be done in not much longer than 8 years. But you are looking at something exceeding the cost of Apollo.

Yes, I know Mars One claims they have a plan for a one-way trip that will only cost 6 billion: "The six billion figure is the cost of all the hardware combined, plus the operational expenditures, plus margins." (Emphasis added.)

But they also claim "This plan is built upon existing technologies available from proven suppliers." apparently blissfully unaware of the fact that (as rudy_wayne posted above) that no one knows how to build a workable re-entry system http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet/ . I guess if you wave away all of the really hard problems its all quite easy.

They also don't address the costs of maintaining the colony in perpetuity - it saves on the really hard problem of return but creates a permanent multi-billion dollar annual obligation to the Earth to keep their colony of four people alive.

Einstein appears in The Simpsons. As a zombie. Since he is dead there aren't too many other opportunities for him to show up in Springfield.

There is still no general theory of superconductivity.

Time slowing the faster you go is weird. Matter and energy being the same is weird. Gravity warping space and slowing time is weird. Plenty of weird stuff came from Einstein.