n/t

Wyomingâ(TM)s biggest hydrocarbon production isnâ(TM)t oil or gas; itâ(TM)s coal. How do you run a car on coal? You burn it in a power plant, and power an EV with the electricity. Wyoming should be the most pro-EV state in the nation.

We already have pictures from the surface of titan: https://www.planetary.org/spac... . Light there is 1000x less intense than noon sunlight on earth, but plenty enough to take pics.

Of course they do -- what if a restaurant is found to have unclean activities in its kitchen that threaten the health of diners, and are against the health code. They sure can shut them down. And a good thing, too, for anyone who prefers their food sans E. Coli.

I mean, weâ(TM)re all waiting for the end of time, in some sense, right? Why not do it up here though? Whatâ(TM)s the advantage to waiting in a basement?

Didn't Dilbert suggest this back in 1998.

Storing energy as hydrogen and burning it in a car later is 3x less efficient than storing it in batteries. Hydrogen makes no sense. Get a battery electric vehicle instead.

From the summary: "A prisoner could just as easily read the works of Vonnegut or Heinlein and claim it as his holy book, and demand accommodation of Bokononism or the Church of All Worlds [citing Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land]. "

I don't get it -- so inventing a religion from science fiction authors Kurt Vonnegut or Robert Heinlein would be bogus. But inventing a religion from science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard yields a viable and constitutionally protected religious practice. What's the difference?

far deeper in fact, than we've ever cored. That number must be wrong -- I'm guessing it should read 200m. It's in the original story, I know, but it just can't be right.

I do believe you have won the comments section for this article ;). Thanks to everyone else for playing!

2.5%, huh -- I'm not impressed. So basically if we all stopped flying it would have just a tiny effect on net anthropogenic CO2 production. Sounds like we should concentrate our efforts on other more profligate industries first and worry about building electric airliners in 50 years.

I tell you, when I look at a map of Europe, I always think, "Wow, you know, those countries are just way too big. We need to break them up into a whole bunch of tiny ethnically-uniform microstates".

I guess that I don't understand people's privacy objections here. Those people who got free BlackBerries are well aware of the monitoring. Legally, either party may record a conversation and save it and provide it to whomever they want (Though this varies by state). It's the responsibility of the BlackBerry owner to make sure that their friends know the situation -- and based on the last drug-text, they do.

The bigger question that should be in a /. poll soon, is: "I would give a researcher all of your phone data, text, and other information, in exchange for a free:

(1) dumb phone
(2) BlackBerry
(3) iPhone
(4) RAZR smart phone
(5) CowboyNeal "

There's plenty of oxygen on Titan. The whole crust is made out of water ice. True there is no free molecular oxygen, but neither was there on Earth before about a billion years ago.

As for life on Titan, the suggestion is that there might be an opportunity when the liquid water beneath Titan's 50-km-thick ice crust bubbles to the surface (a "cryovolcano"), or when a meteor impact leaves a patch of melted local bedrock (which is water ice, so the patch would be a lake). When liquid water from one of these sources combines with the organics in the atmosphere, who knows what happens. But it better happen fast -- the whole thing freezes over in 10^4 years!

I'm a professor. "Back to school" for me means less parking ;)