Relatively popular is somewhat pushing it. The overwhelming majority of people have never been horse riding. "It is only relatively popular amongst MPs and vastly rich powerful people and travellers" two of this group were outraged.

some CRTs went higher than that. However even with no shielding the dose rate would be too low to be a weapon. Admittedly you might not want to sit in front of it for years..

The clue being the heat. In the X-ray range 1% of the electron beam is converted to X-rays the rest to heat. This is why X-ray tubes are either on for short periods, water cooled or have massive metal anodes.

Just a bit more than a typical microwave oven. You oven can go to about say 300 degrees celsius equivalent to about 0.05 eV.

To ionize oxygen or hydrogen (13.6 eV) by heating well that's going to take about 158,000 degrees. The long and the short of it being that ionization by heating is not easy.

I also notice the list of representatives include folk from Npower, BP, CBI and the US Embassy. Not exactly the standard sources of hardcore left wingers. Still best to gloss over these folk as focusing on them may not fit in with the promotion of FUD.

Clearly a generally pro science network supporting the scientific consensus is an important tale that absolutely warrants such a massively informed debate.

I would imagine it would be far far easier to breed (or use GM techniques) to make a crop plant that can deal with what is effectively a super short season than to attempt to light up the night. You could even store some of the daytime heat and smooth the "seasonal" temp transitions using a high heat capacity plastic mixed into the soil.

Given tundra based trees survive months with no usable light due to thick snow cover and natural summer annuals often only get light for growth for a few weeks a year this doesn't seem the biggest issue with moon farming.

Maybe try googling " lifetime risk car accident america" and reading the very first link:

http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/trasnsportpop.html

They give annual US odds at 1:~6200 and lifetime odds of 1:~80.
*sighs*

Okay "very bad" -> "far below average".

The main advantage of computer driven cars is that they learn faster than humans. A human is at a massive learning disadvantage as he can't exactly replicate his actions, recall his sensory input perfectly, vary aspects of his driving without affecting other aspects nor make changes that are smaller than his biologically imposed resolution limit. The computer can learn more from every previous race and try more things in the search for lower lap times. After sufficient versions/updates (and assuming a sporting governing body doesn't implement blocking rules) the AI's ability will exceed the upper limit imposed by the biology of the driver.

I can't see any other way this could possible work out.

So you think that lethal accidents are caused by a minority of very bad drivers. Very bad as in not mere speeding or not paying attention as almost everyone does occasionally. That would be interesting if true. Do you have any stats. or links to back that up?

I would (perhaps naively) have assumed that most types of non trivial road accidents have a chance of lethality. So I wouldn't expect those involved in lethal accidents to have a significantly different ability distribution to normal accidents.

Damn straight, why worry about the safety of yourself or others when you can be having fun.

For Americans death by car accident is about a 1 in 100 lifetime chance not massive but hardly minuscule. If you could say half that is that not a reasonable thing to do.

Thou of course everyone is an above average driver so the odds don't apply to them.

messed up the figures there it should be 0.00001% instead of 0.01%

I once mentioned shielding to a X-ray laser physicist who was talking about his high energy X-ray laser. "Aren't you worried about shielding?". The reply "O no our X-rays don't go that far in air."

That's when I realized that laser physicists have a slightly different interpretation of high-energy than most radiation physicists. I only consider high energy X-rays those at 100 keV+.

Sort of killing the buzz here but if you read the paper and maybe look at figure 2B you will see why this technique (high-harmonic generation) cannot be extended to be usable at higher keV beam without the laws of physics changing. At the current higher end their efficiency has fell to what 0.01% and falling fast.

Yes but they also fight over here. Just look at the German Motorola Vs Apple war.

I don't see how you can blame Google for an Apple led consortium giving a load of their patents to a massive patent troll (after promising to license them reasonably). You can blame Google and Intel for pushing up the price that's about it.

It would surprise me and most Atomic physicists. The exact made up of weapon components is secret but the interactions of X-rays with matter, even hot dense matter is not and such experiments are well within the domain of even an average university lab.