In addition to the quantity of sleep, quality and timing make big differences. Individuals with sleep apnea, for example, with poor sleep quality and fragmented sleep can spend 8 hours "sleeping" and still be nonrestored, as well as suffer a growing catalog of long term consequences in the neurologic, cardiovascular and metabolic domains. Trying to live, or for that matter sleep, out of phase with your circadian rhythm - as for example sleeping 'til noon on weekends and arising (or trying to) at 7am on weekdays - leads to its own significant dysfunction.

In addition to making it harder to detect tax cheating, it may offer a new avenue to launder money.

My first home computer was an NCR keyboard/thermal printer/modem (yes, with the cups to hold the phone handpiece) talking to a Univac 1102 OR a Control Data Cyber depending on who I was writing for that day. We thought big iron would never die.

A long time since I took the survival course, but when considering being downed at sea I seem to recall taking the salt water, forming a pool of it the raft, and allowing it to condense on a slanted surface above it and drip potable water into a container. This device might work well in a warm, sunny, floating on the ocean environment where humidity and energy from the sun are plentiful.

We (humans) do the same: the air is conditioned -warmed and humidified- on its way through the nose. Blood flow to the nose is dynamic, changing the degree of expansion of the folds of tissue lining the sides of the nasal passages, which changes surface area for heat and moisture transfer as well as supplying more (usually) warm blood to deliver heat to the airstream. the new issue from this paper may be that it could change body temperature. In people it doesn't typically alter body temperature a lot, but we do on occasion use very warm air (40 centigrade or a bit higher) to try and warm up people with hypothermia. The low heat capacity of air compared to water/fluids limits how effective that can be.

The "I have a right to have a gun" line wears a little thin for those of us who have spent our summer nights in a city ED trying to save a 17 year old kid who's only mistake was wearing the wrong color while someone else drove by looking for vengence and with easy access to a (conventionally manufactured) gun. We're killiing our children and one more way to make a gun is one more who can die.

In case anyone wonders, a liter of gasoline has about 30 megajoules of energy tied up in it while TNT has about 4 megajoules in a kilogram. Speed of release is, of course, an issue, but please don't park that little pickup truck on my block.

I went through a phase of taking macrophotographs of small portions of classic paintings in a large museum, and turning them into rather nice prints to decorate my apartment. I didn't think, at the time, that was something I would invite people to come and admire. I'm still a little surprised about this much interest in someone rearranging and condensing someone else's art.

Besides mechanics, please recall that EMS and police often face the issue of getting through metal to reach injured passengers. The 200 volts typically in a hybrid battery is one issue, knowing the location of batteries and how to disconnnect them another, but the thought of potentially still charged capacitors in the body frame sounds like an issue that could hinder response to emergencies.

In thinking about why this happened, don't loose sight of the time they chose to make the configuration change was 00:47 local. Human performance on 3rd shift isn't what it is on day shift, and I would think it very likely the people managing this change had been up and working for a significant number of hours at that time. Would they have noticed something or done something differently at 10:00 local? Certainly making an upgrade at a time of lowest use sounds right, but it's not always as simple as that, and you have to respect the realities of circadian rhythms or suffer the consequences. If this were an air crash, we would not we interviewing survivors, coworkers and family to identify when each of the participants in the event and the decisions made had slept during the days preceding the event.

I've been teaching 27 years in a university located in the less rural northeast US. I've never had a salesman visit about textbooks. I think the differential in price is the motivating factor for the publishers, but I doubt the driving mechanism is to recover a specific sales related cost rather than general greed. The issue is tying up information is an expensive format for a "middleman" to take a profit. This is particularly so with respect to scholarly journals. If we (producers of the studies and texts) published in an electronic format more, or in the lower cost paper format, we would help to prevent the spiral in education costs now seen in the US.