Astonishing

Turning a brain clear is pretty impressive.

I suspect it gets really clever when you add stains which are specific to various chemicals and see where they are concentrated.

This is just the Start of the Art.

Might explain a porttion of random laptop failures?

Just a thought.

What is that? About 10x the rate of inflation?

Somebody pointed out that when the UK Premier league started player salaries were about 40x support salaries.

Now it's more like 150x.

The cult of the "superstar Board." Heads we win, tales we still win.

But note with so many shares held by hedge funds/pension funds too many shareholders are too f**king gutless to say "No, you don't deserve this."

For those just knowledgable enough to be dangerous.

You're looking at pellets in the 100s of gram range accelerating a vehicle 150 000 bigger. Force = Mass x Acceleration so at 30Km/s and 0.1Kg you get a force of 3000N. By Newtons 3rd law on a body of 150 mt that's about 0.02 m/s, or about 0.002g.

So no people won't be tripping over each other. The fact it runs for 3 days might have been another clue that would not be happening.

The short impulse does make it a shock load but the same could be said of the explosions in the cylinders of a car (which this somewhat resembles).

NIAC is low budget, high risk investment into potentially game changing technology .and they've actually done phase 1 of this. All other fusion proposals have come from a fusion power background where breakeven and electricity generation are key goals. They dumped these and followed the analysis. From their PoV wrapping a fusing plasma in a series of magnetically driven foils (IE thin sheets <1mm thick) is actually a good thing as it gives them more reaction mass to push out the back.

Note they still have not generated fusion which I think is a pretty big point but if they do that will be a bargain. As for a 200KW PV array keep in mind the ISS array while big is several generations behind the SoA in PV cells, either mult junction or using solar concentrators.

But will it measure the *speed* of entanglement?

Only if as the Chinese state its around 13000x c that's still not going to be very far. At around 3 ns/m the entanglement would take about 1-2ns to propagate (It's too early to be reaching for a calc for actual numbers).

This is a good use for the ISS. Unique environment and fairly simple hardware (could all the kit already be on board for other purposes?)

.

Intriguing

It's just an impression but magnetic based systems seem to be more radiation resistant and higher density but historically have been a bit slower. Not an issue for things like smartcards or crypto storage keys.

Is IARPA the new name for DARPA or an expansion of them?

Like a lava lamp for people with X ray vision

But apart from that notion this is a very clever idea that totally side steps the classic problems of getting the H2 away from the C.

How many people (who don't investigate liquid metals) would have thought of this one?

Note that with modern high temperature insulation the column can be kept hot with relatively little heat input, obviously bigger diameter, more volume, less surface area to emit it over.

Version 0.1 tech but what potential.

Will probably remain free to air in China.

After all Rupert is a man the Party can do business with.

I wonder if tape data recovery is as hard as disk recovery.

I'd bet not.

When your media is unreadable it's access speed is zero.

Yes the solid state part is important. Yes it will hurt some targets, but how narrow band is it?

Because if this is a single frequency device then fabricating interference mirrors which are 99.99% reflective at the target wave length is very possible.

It's efficiency is good (for a laser) in the high 20%s and it sound like it's power budget is actually quite reasonable.

Probably it's greatest benefit will be to move the tech of laser lightcraft a step closer to reality.

The dazzle issue against enemy pilots does sound like UN Convention on the Rules of War violation however.

20 different turbulence metrics and no agreement.

Looks like there's a shed load of rubbish that needs to be cleared out here. Some of them don't seem worth the computer time spent used to calculate them.

Yes the graphs are alarmist (Nature now has a separate magazine devoted to "climate change." Business is looking good to my cynical business eye).

But keep going with at least trying to get some consensus.

Usual caveats. No new on site collected data. Obviously how realistic is this IPCC emissions scenario? Will climate modellers down grade some of the less accurate metrics or keep on using them?

But still 13000x faster than light.

I mean you there must be something that can be done with this information.

Note what's impressive.

It's hours, not days or weeks.

It (can) make detailed DNA analysis routine

Which can include identifying what pharmaceuticals cannot be metabolized by someone (making their prescription completely pointless, of which there are at least 200 known) as well as what chemo drugs could work for cancer treatment.

In fact it could cover any condition for which a large number of drugs exist but but whose performance varies widely on an individual basis.

Thumbs up for (potentially) bringing it out of a rare lab technique and into a routine diagnostic.

How many people here have a mortgage?

I've read the self reliant, save and don't borrow Norman Rockwell BS and in reality it does not happen that often. In hindsight increasing your lending in a market where defaults are rising is pretty stupid (if you actually care about having a long term business, which HBOS senior management did not).

Most people in the UK could not buy a house outright and don't know anyone who would let them buy it directly from them (IE a sort of HP agreement)

BTW half of the German banking system is built on small local banks, more like credit unions.

When a proposal was made to relax the rules on the locality of UK credit unions the UK banks mouthpiece spokesperson protested this would increase default risk and competition.

Let me suggest a PoV. The UK housing market is dominated by big house builders who control huge land banks and big banks who control mortgage lending.

It is in their interest that housing remain scarce, prices high and quality low. What to do about it is the problem.

So what's in it for Google?

They're in this for the bucks and they don't take prisoners.

It'll be more than just letting them do business more easily. It'll be an actual way to generate revenue.

Yes I am that cynical.

A note on the history NHS number

When it was founded a way was needed to issue everyone with a number.

The number is derived from the wartime identity card number.

This smells like a late day data grab.

I like to think of it as "Secondary banking crisis, 2.0"

Institution picks up short term money market borrowing to cover short fall between assets and loans, relying on house price inflation and sufficient good payers to keep the cash rolling over.

Something rather like this happened in the early 1970s.

It will happen again because all bankers know that "liquidity" requirement (of X% of all funds staying in the bank and being available) is set by regulators who a) Lack banking experience b)Have an exaggerated sense of risk about investments c)Are Guardian reading pinko Liberals.

So whatever limit the regulators set it will just seem far to high (CDOs were exactly a way to fame the system but that's another story).

The notion that their pursuit of ever bigger bonuses might be skewing their judgement (or they might have their heads buried firmly up their own arse) of course never enters their thinking.

"Unfair to NPE"

So trolls would have to pay a kind of "hunting tax" before they can start threatening end users and companies that actually use their patents don't.

Well boo f**king hoo for NPE's.

Still at least this lot were prepared to name their client without pleading the 5th.

Thumbs up to Rackspace. Trolls are not like "real" companies. Being sensible and trying to settle grievances does not work with them. They need to be smacked and smacked hard.

Apple. Guarding your privacy

Are you f**king kidding me?

Man i/c of enormo-pervassive new dole system says "no problems here"

Strangely I find myself deeply unreassured.

Small factoid. Despite recent coverage in the Daily jailbait Heil the proportion of families with more than 2 children claiming benefits is <<1% of all claims.

Exciting times

AMS is a very large lump of hardware and getting it to ISS was quite a feat. This should just be the start of results in this area.

BTW I think the magnet (a key part of how it can resolve what particles and what energy they have) was made in the UK.

I wonder what this will do to the Drake equation.

In the 1960s no one even knew if any other star had planes, let alone Earth mass and temperature.

Now we seem to be closing in on an actual number

That's pretty exciting. It also moves the debate from "Why leave the solar system, there's nowhere to go?" to "If we did leave the solar system, where should we go?"