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Comment Re:Important Question #1 (Score 1) 185

Btw, it's 'eierlegende Wollmichsau' ('egg laying wool milk pig')

'Eierliegendewollmichsau' means 'egg lying wool milk pig' (present participle and gerund of lie, like in 'lying on the ground')

And 'eierlegend' is an adjective that wouldn't be joined with the noun. Even Germans sometimes break up their words. It's not all "Donau dampfschiff fahrts elektrizitäten hauptbetriebs werkbau unterbeamten gesellschaft" (remove the spaces because Slashdot complains about the compound word being ascii art - go figure).

Comment Invent an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) (Score 2) 211

...and let it solve the problem. It can send tiny self-replicating nano robots to mars (and the rest of the solar system) and terraform those ugly, hostile lumps of rock and ice and gas to our heart's content. No need to send soft, squishy, inefficient bags of meat across several AUs when you can use a sturdy swarm of several trillion nanos to do the job.

And while they are at it they can clean up Earth too.

Just make sure we survive the singularity and won't turn into grey goo!

Good read on the topic of ASI:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

Image

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Comment Title misleading (Score 5, Insightful) 921

Replace "Health Benefits" with "Nutritional Benefits" and it's ok. You certainly won't starve eating non-organic food. And you'll get pretty much the same level of basic nutritional elements (vitamins etc.).

But you will get more pesticide contamination, more genetically modified food, more additives and a few other nasty bits and pieces. And you will create more impact on the environment.

And keep in mind that this was a meta-study, just looking at existing publications. Their selection criteria pretty much guaranteed the domination of conventional food studies carried out by the industry.

Comment Re:from TFA (Score 5, Informative) 921

No need to expand anything. People just need to eat less meat. There's a conversion factor of around 8 to 15 converting plant-based food into any kind of meat. You loose around 90% of your nutrional energy by that conversion. We could easily feed the world if the industrial nations wouldn't insist on their daily hamburgers and steaks.

Portables

A Look Back At the World's First Netbook 143

Not-A-Microsoft-Fan writes with this excerpt from The Coffee Desk: "Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions, the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would term a netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and its (albeit early) web browsing software. The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (we're flying now!)."
Earth

Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs 211

Garimelda writes "Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."
Security

Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline 284

thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."

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