Hopefully

A cure for ebola (and perhaps an advance in combating viruses?)

Pew Pew

The Physics of Space Battles

Pedantic note:  He says "In space, laser light will travel almost forever without dissipating from diffraction," which is not true at all.  Diffraction works just fine in a vacuum and a diffraction-limited beam (ie, one that is not limited by any engineering compromises in the optics, but only limited by the fundamental effect of light's wave-like propagation) will spread by an angle roughly equal to the beam diameter divided by the wavelength.  A green (lambda=0.5um) 5 cm diameter diffraction limited laser beam will have an angular spread of about 1/10000 radians, so at 10km it will be about a meter wide.  Ish.  Whether the beam is traveling in vacuum or air or glass doesn't really affect diffraction at all.

There would be less scattering and absorption by random particles and clouds and less refraction by turbulence cells and inversion-layers, etc, ie, things that really do bother current atmospheric propagation of high-intensity laser beams (and stars, that's why they twinkle).  That might be what he meant, but that's not what he said.

Don't believe the hype

The Science is Settled (or not).

Science!

Real, but rather funny, science paper abstracts: NCBI ROFL. (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

I can partially relate

The importance of stupidity in scientific research
Martin A. Schwartz
Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia
Accepted 9 April 2008

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

beautiful

From the Department of Awful Statistics

Previously, correlation does imply correlation.

You can check in any time, but...

A black hole with a view - Physicists calculate what you would see inside of a black hole.

funny cause it's true

Correlation is not causation

The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs

Mr Burns seeks curb-appeal

Extreme Makeover: Nuclear Power Plant Edition

As the world seeks low-carbon forms of energy production to reduce the emissions blamed for global warming, the champions of nuclear power have been re-branding the industry as one of the world’s greenest.

Last month, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency said “nuclear energy is virtually carbon-free” across its life cycle and “the only carbon-mitigating technology with a proven track record on the scale required.”

Now, more than two decades after accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, some people in the industry are backing a makeover for nuclear power stations in an effort to transform the industry from an industrial pariah to an environmental savior.

My suggestion - granite counter tops and home theater rooms. Perhaps radiant floor heating if you really want to go top end.

But those small tweaks aside, I think a lot of their work is done, since people aren't so terrified of nuclear weapons that they are digging bomb shelters in their back yards, and the hype about nuclear-powered everything that went on during the fifties is also gone, so that there aren't unrealistic expectations either.

Of course, long term radioactive waste is still a problem. Currently, Europe handles this through breeder reactors, which works fine if you are able to secure the high weapons grade residue. I was talking with a friend who works in a laser fusion lab, and he mentioned that one of the proposals going forward, from the NIF team I think, is to use high powered lasers to burn and process radiative waste through inertial confinement. So the goal wouldn't be net-positive gain fusion, but just the disposal of waste material from fusion plants. Which is a much more feasible task. There would still be end products, but they would have radioactive half-life's of a hundred years or so, which is a lot more managable than the hundred thousand years of the original waste. It's hard to plan on time-scales that will experience geological change.