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[Starver]

Well, it's one thing to get the materials, and another thing to actually survive the process. Doing anything with HCL is generally bad news. I nearly killed myself just trying to pour shock into my pool (which is literally a jug of HCL); between trying to pour slowly enough so that it didn't splash back onto me and trying to hold my breath because oh god do you know something will kill you if you inhale too much when you physically cannot inhale it. That was in open air! Imagine trying to do anything with the stuff in a closed room; you'll kill yourself almost immediately. Unless you have a fume hood, which begs many questions.

At least you did it the right way round.  Add the acid to the water, not the water to the acid.

(The analogy I was taught is that one has a room full of hungry prisoners and a room full of bread.  Moving the prisoners (one at a time, if necessary) into the room full of bread is preferable to taking the bread and throwing it (even as quick as you can!) into the room full of prisoners.)

[Starver]

@Iceball- .-. I've already said that I agree with you guys and that acid bullets aren't practical.. At all..

Which doesn't stop the theorising.  Practical?  Are you, or are you not, a dwarf?

[ChairmanPoo]

Secondly, "Ringworld" (and sequels), by David Niven.  The emergency Slaver Stasis Field device fitted to the nigh-on-indestructible starship hulls to make occupants similarly immune to any danger, for the duration of said dangers.

Larry. Not David.

The ringworld setting is kind of interesting, although I like it far less than I used to nowadays. Also, LN is a notorious right wing nut. In his later works it tells, too...

[Starver]

Secondly, "Ringworld" (and sequels), by David Niven.  The emergency Slaver Stasis Field device fitted to the nigh-on-indestructible starship hulls to make occupants similarly immune to any danger, for the duration of said dangers.

Larry. Not David.

You're right.  I was watching (the original) Casino Royale, yesterday, so David Niven was obviously in my brain.  (Not his best movie, possibly not even the best Casino Royale.  But certainly the one I've enjoyed watching over and over again, the most, in both categories.

The ringworld setting is kind of interesting, although I like it far less than I used to nowadays. Also, LN is a notorious right wing nut. In his later works it tells, too...

I'm not as well read up on (any given) Niven as I probably should be.  I went through a phase of reading through the library as alphabetically as I could, so Asimov and Clarke featured more than Niven.

(Wells somehow got a good look in, but Zahn and Zelazny very little.  Far too much Piers Anthony, though, given I only started giving up on the Xanth series when I discovered the (new at the time) Discworld series by Pratchett.  I think I actually got up to "Isle of View", though.  Probably lost out to "Guards! Guards!", from the same 'newly out in paperback' time-frame and I've not looked back since.  But that's not Science.)


Also sorry for not putting those previous 'replies' together into one post.  Would have been neater.  Shoulda coulda woulda.

[ChairmanPoo]

I went through a phase of reading through the library as alphabetically as I could, so Asimov and Clarke featured more than Niven.

Both are far better than Niven. So nothing wrong with your reading order. 

[Arx]

Hey, my country's relevant!

In brief: Hominid fossils found in Sterkfontein caves estimated at 2.5 million years old; evidence suggests intentional burial, a behaviour thought to be exclusively or near-exclusively modernish humans'. This also makes them difficult to date exactly, since the surroundings obviously don't date to the same time.

Edit:

And apparently we can use sugar beet processing waste to make supermaterials now.

[scrdest]

Bad thread, no hibernating for winter.

In a classic science move, some guys working on malaria found a way to really fuck up a cancerous cell's day. Not, as some headlines report, 90% of cancers, but a whole bunch anyway.

TL;DR malaria likes to attack placental cells, both placental cells and cancer cells present the same sugar (which was known to be present for the former - the discovery is that so do the cancers), we already knew what malaria protein is responsible for the affinity to placentas so they essentially used it as a homing missile by attaching a diphteria toxin to the protein to ensure tumor is kill.

[jaked122]

Bad thread, no hibernating for winter.

In a classic science move, some guys working on malaria found a way to really fuck up a cancerous cell's day. Not, as some headlines report, 90% of cancers, but a whole bunch anyway.

TL;DR malaria likes to attack placental cells, both placental cells and cancer cells present the same sugar (which was known to be present for the former - the discovery is that so do the cancers), we already knew what malaria protein is responsible for the affinity to placentas so they essentially used it as a homing missile by attaching a diphteria toxin to the protein to ensure tumor is kill.

I had no idea malaria was that nasty.

[Reelya]

That sort of makes sense in light of some stuff I saw on a Paul Davies video, looking at alternate approaches to researching cancer. His new research suggests that cancer operates by hijacking deactivated embryonic development code in the genome, and turning it on again.

He's a physicist by training, but he got roped into cancer research this because they wanted a fresh perspective from theorists from outside the field (basically they have fuck all to show for billions of research dollars spent). Paul Davies notes that a vast chunk of the research goes into the "triggers" for cancer rather than what it is, and how it operates. It's like your entire comp. security system was built around keeping hackers out, but you didn't put much thought into how to prevent the hacker doing nasty shit once he's inside ... When he started in the field he asked some really quite obvious questions that you'd expect them to know, and everyone in the field basically said they didn't know because nobody ever thought to ask the questions he was asking. Which shows the value of inter-disciplinary research.

It's 90 minutes long, but here's the lecture Paul Davies gave on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoQYh0qPtz8

[Arx]

3spookyactionatadistance5me

Basically, some guys at the Delft University of Technology have demonstrated reasonably conclusively that quantum entanglement violates locality.

[PTTG??]

Pretty big news. Let's get the relevant XKCD out of the way.

So yeah, you can't send data this way because all we can do is examine the particle, which then causes the particle to decay. There's no method to control the way the particle decays, or even determine if the particle has decayed without measuring it (and therefore causing the particle to decay).

BUT it does tell us one thing that scientists love to hear: We've made a fundamental error in our working theory of the universe. Now we get to go find out what it is!

Here's a different article that I think does a fair job of explaining some of the difficulties in the experiment.

[i2amroy]

Pretty big news. Let's get the relevant XKCD out of the way.

Damn it! Beat me to it.

That said as far as I know this experiment doesn't really violate anything that we didn't have a fairly large consensus on beforehand (i.e., that quantum entanglement allows for information to propagate faster than light, but only random information, thus not allowing faster than light communication). What it does do is shut down any last gasps of local hidden variable theories.

And yeah, what this could really be useful for is extremely secret key verification, because it would involve taking two measurements of entangled things in such a way that it was impossible for signals to go back and forth between the two communicating systems. If they were the same measurement then you know you were communicating with the proper person, and such a system would be nigh impossible to "spoof", even more so then our current system is.

[PTTG??]

We are kind of lucky we haven't developed cheap quantum computing to break encryption before we developed entanglement encryption.

Of course, we still need to get this stuff on the market and deployed in a number of essential places such as banking and military communication.

There's still time for a global security crisis seeing as quantum computing still has a head start...

[Reelya]

Maybe it's not luck at all. I mean, it's hard to imagine a situation where you could even build a working quantum computer without having the entanglement ability.

[TheBiggerFish]

PTW !!FOR SCIENCE!!