insane_alien

yes it would. however, i find collecting it in an upturned testtube filled with the acid solution to be the better option. either way, it will slowly diminish over time due to oxygen leaking in from pretty much everywhere.

possible: yes practical: no you'd need a bajillion(well, maybe a few tens of thousands) to power a single house. and thats if they're all firing off continuously, which they won't be as they send electricity in pulses other ways of harnessing power from animals, well horses, donkeys, oxen etc have been used for millenia in farmng applications. really, machines are better for power.

put simply, we don't know. and anyone who says they do know is lying. we have a few guesses but thats all they are, guesses. we have no idea what the physics of the early early universe was like. our theories can only go back so far and maintain accuracy. If it is beyond the tested limits of the theory then it is only an extrapolation and might not reflect reality. the LHC will allow us to describe the early universe much more accurately and with more confidence. who knows, we may even discover something that show there was no singularity or maybe our extrapolations will be confirmed as accurate.

eh i think that would have minimal effect. the neutron population will be low as the chain reaction is already halted. soaking up residual neutrons wouldn't do much as its good old radioactive decay rather than fission keeping it warm just now. as far as i'm aware, free neutron density doesn't affect it too much.

5 reactors shut down according to plan when the tremors were detected by the safety systems. only 1 is actually experiencing a failure. the other 4 plants will return to operating status once they have been thoroughly inspected for damage and/or repaired.

Also, regretably, the demand for power in Japan will have decreased until the affected areas are brought back to habitable conditions. Several large settlements currently have effectively zero power draw due to the extent of the damage.

we probably won't know for sure the exact chain of events until months later. There has been a major natural disaster, miscommunications and so on will be frequent not to mention the emotional side. I think we can take from the fact that the exclusion zone is sitting at only 20km is a sign that, yes, radiation has been detected but not much more is currently expected to be released.

no, its not good. BUT its not as bad as it could potentially be. Quite frankly I think it is a testament to the engineering used to build the reactor that it has survived the largest earthquake in japan in recorded history, a tsunami AND a large explosion with only relatively minor breaches in containment caused by the venting of steam. kind of makes you wonder what all these people going around saying nuclear power plants are deathtraps are actually on about. for instance, if a terrorist wanted to blow up that plant, to create an explosion that size would require an amount of explosive so obvious that even the most homer simpson like security guard would be suspicious of it. I'm being optimistic about this. They've decided to flood it with seawater(writing off what remains of the plant in the process) to keep it cool and once the situation has stabilised I think they'll be quick to get a secondary containment structure in place and start decomissioning. I don't think there will be any significant release of radiation.

ehh, its unlikely it will be as concentrated as what is in his stomach. unless he's decided to use a ridiculous concentration

just pH the solution before you recrystalise. there will likely be a bit of sodium bicarb leftover but probably not enough to affect the taste. and as you can eat bicarb without any serious issues(i do it for indigestion) the salt formed will be safe enough. again, just make sure the pH is roughly neutral so you have a good ratio of salt and it should be safe. obviously follow proper safety rules, such as if the crystals don't look like expected (ie. luminous orange) better not to eat it until you know exactly whats causing that.

ReactOS is not a good choice so far. try wine. Because i guarantee if it doesn't run on wine, it isn't going to run on React OS. ReactOS is an ambitious project but it is currently still deep deep in alpha land and has very poor support for hardware, especially advanced graphics.

small quantities. it stems from the early days of measurement when it was used to refer to things you knew were present, but the abundance was too small to measure ie, you could only detect traces of them

i'm with john, 200 years ago all farming had the same basic crops (wheat, oats, potatoes, cabbage etc.) and they didn't have pesticides. now, at some point they started using them. and it wasn't for no reason at all. most of what was farmed 200 years ago had a very low yield and pests could destroy crops to the extent that there was mass starvation it was a tenuous position. pesticides cured a LOT of problems that we don't see now because we use pesticides. now, due to the widespread nature of pesticides, pest populations are kept low. so its likely that you could grow one or two fields per dozen without pesticides and not see the ravaging effects pests had 200 years ago. now if all fields were made pesticide free we'd see one hell of a lot more pest. we'd essentially be back to the days when there WERE clouds of locusts so massive they blotted out the sun. you may get a year or two of production before pests reach intolerable levels but rest assured that they'll get there. and it would be bad enough that even the people today yammering on about pesticides being bad and so on would order their use.

lets get causality sorted out here. evolution does not require conciousness to be true. ALL evolution assumes is that there is a replicator with inheritence and it is possible for mistakes to be made in the replication. conciousness on the other hand evolved. you could even say conciousness was the RESULT of evolution. nobody would classify the fruit fly as concious but they have been observed evolving. bacteria and viruses certainly aren't concious but they are observed evolving all the time.

the electrons are bouncing off the trace quantities of gas in there making it glow.

I've been pepper sprayed, not because I was attacking someone but because me and my friends were stupid enough to wonder 'How bad could it be anyway?' It's bad. It's an experience I don't think any of us will ever want to be repeated. Also there are plenty of youtube videos of it making battle hardened soldiers cry litke little girls. If it can do that to a commando then think what it'll do to your average mugger.

you can think of it this way, the flourine ion is smaller than all the other halogen ions meaning that the potential at the 'surface' is greater. This makes it more difficult for the hydrogen ion to escape and it holds water molecules very tightly. if you plot the pKa values of the haloacids you'll see a general trend of the further down the group, the stronger the acid. hydroiodic acid is the strongest of them and has the largest ionic radius. it would be hydroastatic acid but the electro negativities are so close that the hydrogen can sometimes come away as the hydride ion and so the whole mess ends up as free hydrogen and astatine. but the dissociation constant is the highest.

yep, that could be possible. however the beings looking back at us would see the milky way as it was 4 billion years ago. we tend to look further than 4 billion light years to observe the really early universe though. the cmbr is about 13 billion light years away.

you aren't supposed to just give away the answer, you should at the very most show them the methodology

no, but you'd be growing the plants in insulated environments anyway as the temperature is below freezing most places and times.

yes, or something that appears very much like it. also, THREAD TITLES DON'T HAVE TO BE IN ALL CAPS

well, the reason it didn't just flop over onto its side was because the stuff it was made of was too weak, even without the impact and fire damage. the steel beams simply weren't strong enough to form a pivot to allow for any significant lateral acceleration. perhaps if it was over engineered to the point where it was essentially a solid ingot of steel then you might be able to get it to pivot, but then an air craft crashing into it wouldn't have done nearly as much damage. this isn't saying the steel used was weak, just that as things get bigger their massgets bigger faster than strength

my biggest complaint with the cyclists i encounter on the road to work: wear some high vis clothing and get some lights(or at the very least some reflectors) I nearly smeared a cyclist all over the road because I honestly could not see him until he decided to meander out into the middle of the lane and i seen him silhouetted against the reflective sign at a bend further up the road. i had to swerve into the other lane to avoid him and if there was traffic coming the other way, well someone would have died for sure, probably the cyclist because at that time opposing traffic tends to be large trucks or tractors and i don't want to put myself under one of those. Appart from that one complete idiot the majority of the other cyclists on that road are quite good, proper visibility, correct and timely signalling and correct position of the road. While waiting for a chance to over take can be frustrating when I'm in a rush (as is every delay regardless of source so its nothing personal) they're fine. I'm not going to cut in close to them and i'm not going to shout and swear at them. Then again in glasgow cyclists tend to just ignore cars and cut in front, scrape down the side of the car and occasionally give a cheeky kick to the doors. Seriously, behaving like that is just plain wrong, grow the hell up and follow the rules of the road then the venom directed at you will cease. In short, if the cyclist is obeying the rules of the road, no problem. If the cyclist is behaving like they can do whatever they want on the road because they're in smug pricksville then fuck em, I don't really care about their welfare. same goes for other motorists and anything else that happens to be on the road.

doctors are one of the few groups of people i don't mind having inflated salaries. seeing as its very probable my life will depend on them at some point. I'd rather see a doctor on $200000/a than a basket ball player or a politician.

i'm with the tree. there is no algorithm that can take a deterministic source and somehow decouple it from everything. if you had such an algorithm why not just feed it a string of zeros every time as it should still return different values every time.