As someone who likes cars, driving and motorsport, the big issue in battery EVs for me is the weight. When I've had EV or hybrid hire cars, you go "cool" when you hit the loud pedal, then you go "yuck" when you go round a corner. While I love a petrol engine, I'm OK with an electric powertrain (torque!). However, no one has mentioned energy density yet, which for me is the key thing in powering a car. There was a good scientific study a few years back (can't find reference right now) that compared the energy density of vehicle power sources. Hydrogen is about half the energy density of petrol, when you include the tank (due to the massively increased demands on hydrogen storage vs petrol), but it is still many many times better than any currently conceivable battery technology.

As others have said, hydrogen is a very inefficient way to move electricity (especially when it is 'clean'), but then cars are an inefficient way of moving people. I think there will be a market for hydrogen cars, but sadly I suspect it won't be big enough to support the refuelling network required to make them viable. I'm still hoping though, for the sake of my driving pleasure!

Everyone.Your phone is the usual way of paying in Australia, very few people use cards any more and even fewer use cash. In fact cash is so out of favour that big retailers are having to prop up Armourguard here. There there isn't enough cash being moved for them to remain in business, but the retailers don't want to cut cash purchases off completely. Also almost anyone under the age of 30 uses their phone for pretty much everything, very rarely reverting to a laptop or PC except for work.They are certainly doing all their banking, payments and money transfers via their phone.

I think that often companies look at the cost of effective cybersecurity vs the cost of paying ransoms. The latter is likely much cheaper. Look at this case, effective ongoing security is probably a lot more than the $22 million they've paid out (once, over ?? years?). It's not necessarily that they are 'idiots' that don't know how to secure their systems, but its simply cheaper not too.

We need a way to make it more expensive for them not to run effective security (e.g. personal responsibility, with gaol time likely).

There are lots of defence mechanisms (mostly chemical), but making yourself less tasty is absolutely one of them. The cyanogenic glycosides that are in clover (and lots of other stuff, including apple pips), are there for that reason. When the leaves are damaged they release small amounts of cyanide, which feeding animals (slugs and other molluscs, for example) don't like and they go feed elsewhere - unless they have no other food source, then they put up with stomach ache (it's not enough to kill them).

You don't want to invest too much of your hard earned energy from photosynthesis in these defence mechanisms unless you really need to (optimisation problem), so getting a signal that your neighbours are under attack allows you to upregulate all that stuff and make more of it before you get attacked.

I took a job as a research scientist in Australia some years ago and am now a citizen. No country is perfect, but there are a lot of good things about being here and can't say I regret it.

That was pre-Brexit, but Brexit means that I can't even imagine going back now.

Absolutely, those are really the key figures at the end of the day.

I don't know what the heck happened in Belgium (it is densely populated, but not more so than the Netherlands), we all know what a mess the UK government made of this (and likely are continuing to do), Spain and Italy were hit early and have far better control know, Sweden are letting the old people die for some reason no one outside the country quite understands, so what is different in the US? I would say the difference is that the US is much further behind on the 'curve' than all those other countries. They had the advantage of seeing what was happening in Europe and blew their opportunity. I suspect the US figure will get significantly higher and catch up some of those European countries before this is over unfortunately.

5% death rate is way over the top. Most of the studies to date suggest around 1% or just under. Obviously this is increased where health systems are overwhelmed, poor to start with, inequitable etc.

So I agree, the rates vs confirmed infection in most are meaningless because testing is inadequate. The US is doing a better job in testing than many countries (but not all).

Of course if you are somewhere where the rate of infection (not just the number of infections) is increasing, as is the case in several US states, then the death rate vs confirmed infections is likely an under-estimate.

Personally, I find it bizarre that the US is doing a pretty good job in testing, but, in many places, a terrible job of protecting the population from infection. Trump has a point, if you are going to basically let everyone get it in the end (and accept that 1% death rate), why bother testing?

There's been talk about memristors and their potential impact on computing for a very long time (just use the Slashdot search for examples), but we don't seem to have seen much success. HP have been hyping them over many years to no real effect, but from the linked MIT press release and the Nature Nanotechnology paper at https://www.nature.com/article... (as opposed to the fluff piece quoted) it looks like MIT may have a more viable mechanism.

Well, I think with most of these quick/cheap tests it's not really automating/shrinking the apparatus (which is mostly automated anyway) it is using a different and much simpler detection method with a fixed number of PCR cycles.

The downside is it is pretty much a yes/no answer, rather than a quantitative one that can be interpreted, so they have to be set to high high number of false positives to minimise false negatives. In this case that isn't a problem as false positives likely mean someone being asked to self-isolate, whereas false negatives mean someone spreading the disease....

Mods please check. Parent post has inappropriately been modded troll.

As a biological scientist of 20+ years, who does of course have to publish papers to keep my job (and that's fine), I can tell you the whole scientific publishing model is broken.

The old model relied on reputation and honesty, but on the whole it worked quite well. Even if there was a problem in the short-term it would work it's way out over time. Currently, even the best of the open journals are a bit patchy and there are thousands upon thousands of bad ones. We get tens of emails a week from open journals with zero reputation and usually from a different field, trying to cash in. Couple this with the pressure on time that we now have and the infinite growth in publications that is expected and the peer review is often poor. It's still good in the best (usually paid for) journals, but few others.

So we need a new system and I have no idea what it is. We should of course have as much scientific data and interpretation available to the public as possible, but the open journals right now are failing from the quality stand point. I don't believe it is going to improve, even the PLOS and BMC journals are often not as good as their impact factors suggest; a fair bit of crap gets in and they have been going for 15 years or so.

We aren't going to get the old system back, it's done for. The question is, how do we come up with a new system where we (scientists) can trust what we read in our fields?

"Procter and Gamble Unveils New Device That Aims To Hide Signs of Ageing"

There, fixed that for yer.

We are, but spruiking is a word that has been in common use for many decades and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary at least, is Australian, not South African.

Good on him for standing up for his rights, but from a practical point of view, I wouldn't want that record hanging over me for the rest of my life (or until it expired). So I don't think I would have the guts.

Of course, he could have had something worse to hide....

Except, of course, it is accounted for in the models. If only those climate modellers didn't have a better idea of climate modelling than the general public. Then you might have been right.

More interestingly, in the late 80's and early 90's there was a 'missing sink' in that atmospheric CO2 wasn't increasing as much as the emissions models suggested it would. It turned out that the estimates of increased plant C sequestration were higher than originally thought and the oceans were absorbing more than originally thought (thereby acidifying and damaging corals and molluscs etc.). Of course that was more than 20 years ago now.