Phi for All

Solder is lead-based, and the fumes can cause asthma and chronic bronchitis, iirc. Flux may have some bad fumes too. Can you use a mask or ventilate better when you solder?

It ain't over till the flat lady sings.

Unless you have a PayPal account, right? You should write a story about a starship captain who wants to become a patent attorney. Do you have a PayPal account? Oooh, she's way past the glazed look in her eyes. Call some of her GFs, arrange for them to go to a chick flick, and then log on and geek out, dude! You crazy. Most high school freshmen's main aspirations are bongs and senior cheerleader's tonsils. Everyone says that *before* we start pouring the water. Welcome to the forum, have fun, get dirty, make mistakes.

It was common because pictures of Bush were placed next to pictures of monkeys wearing similar facial expressions. If Obama was similarly facially exuberant, this argument would be appropriate, but he's not (or not yet).

I don't buy the president = monkey bit. Bush was linked that way due to several photos that were parodied with similar facial expressions. Reagan acted *with* a monkey but wasn't compared to one. The Lincoln to Bush bridge is a pretty long one. I also don't see the racist angle. I think it's just supposed to be a topical tie to the recent shooting and the fact that the stimulus bill may be incomprehensible to many. With all the other brilliant cartoonists and cartoons available, I don't know why the Post picked this one to run. That's the part I don't understand. I'll bet one of my favorite cartoonists, Tom Swanson, could do much better, and may even be persuaded to post his effort in this thread. Tom's work is on a par artistically, and has the added benefit of being actually funny.

I think foie gras has a consistency you get because it was grown inside the bird that way. Are you asking if a regular, cheaper liver can be purchased and then processed to become more like foie gras? Is this correct?

Check the car for something with a floral pattern and a roughly tube shape. Odds are you saw something briefly, your mind quickly wanted a pattern to define it before your lady walked away, and it chose "collapsible umbrella", then dismissed it from further thought. Later when you were looking for "collapsible umbrella", you saw the item more clearly but saw that it was the edge of a floral shopping bag sticking out from under the seat, and your mind knew that wasn't "collapsible umbrella" and kept searching to no avail. I don't see how this could be precognition, unless you now go out and buy her a collapsible umbrella and put it in the car for her future use. But then, that's cheating, isn't it?

I think we're having a translation problem. I don't know what "politics" has to do with this subject, and I believe "foie" is French for "liver", not leather.

These sound like absolutes but have question marks, so I'm confused (admittedly easy to do). I don't know if we're far enough along in the research to know anything absolutely. It's my understanding that if you had scar tissue covering an arm stump, removing the scar tissue and encouraging the embryonic cell growth would renew the whole arm. One of the most significant uses would be teeth, imo. Not everyone loses a limb but regrowing lost adult teeth would be incredibly handy and a prolific use of the discovery.

There was a SciAm article a while back talking about how we have everything a salamander has for regenerative growth of a whole limb, but that process is overridden by the formation of scar tissue, presumably due to evolutionary pressure. I guess it's more beneficial for humans to stop bleeding quickly as opposed to waiting for regenerative growth. Salamanders don't form scar tissue, they just move right into some kind of embryonic generation of the leg, tail, toe or whatever was lost. Supposedly, if we can find out how to affect the hierarchy of the scarring process, we may be able to inhibit it in favor of regeneration. Ah, I found it: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=regrowing-human-limbs

Please remember to give your opinion in your OP to set the tone for discussion, otherwise you're just reporting the news, which we don't need *you* for. It's your angle on the story we want. This is so cool, but the cynical side of me is thinking about the pharm that's out there right now trying to spin gold by spinning something more expensive so they can spin it as preferable to the medical industry. I hope they stick to the cotton candy.

Where's "here"?

ashleycory, do you plan on discussing any of the threads you've started? Because cutting and pasting the work of others is plagiarism. If this is your work and you're spreading it around the web, then that is not the purpose of this science discussion forum. Please respond or your threads will be removed.

Peron has been auto-suspended for a combination of plagiarism and trolling infractions. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedtsolkas has been suspended for 1 year for repeatedly posting extraordinary claims and then not responding when asked to back them up. This type of drive-by trolling is not conducive to healthy discussion, which is really what we're all about.

Moved from General Discussion to Ecology and the Environment.

You can live in a foreign country without knowing the language and still make yourself understood adequately. But to insist that the natives stop using their language because *you* don't see the necessity is a bit egoistic, don't you think?

Can you share why you would want to delete the whole account? Perhaps there are some options we can explore.

Yes, but the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us you can't create new energy with the magnets, just change it into electricity via the generator. Then the Second Law tells us you're going to lose a lot of that energy through heat loss to entropy. Friction, wind resistance, all these will stop your magnetic motion generator pretty quickly. I don't know which guy you saw with a car hooked up to diagnostics, but it's all a scam. Believe me, if it could be done with magnets, you'd have science geeks on homemade perpetual Razors scootering all over college campuses everywhere. I saw a guy many moons ago on the Tonight Show (Johnny Carson was host, not Leno), and he had a great sounding machine. It intrigued me because he claimed that setting up his magnets within a gyroscope increased the normal size of its magnetic field, so his claims of getting out more energy than he put in made sense (because he was trying something nobody else had ever tried, according to him). And he was on with Carson, for God's sake! He could never show anyone else how to make one of his generators, and he would never let anyone examine his. He was a big fake, just like all the something-for-nothing scammers.

Well gosh, why didn't some smart scientist come up with this before? Can you explain why this would be called "perpetual"? Otherwise this thread will have to move over to Speculations. "Pretty sure" and "a guy that worked on it" aren't good citations. Can you provide a link to the guy with the perpetual car?

This just in....

I disagree with this part. I think the average person simply resents the billions of dollars being given out for poor performance. They might see it as inevitable that the big guys will be untouchable and never have to take the kind of abuse the average person would have to take if they messed up as badly. Now they're just wondering, like some of the foreign car makers, what you have to do in this country to get ahead. Being honest and hard-working individuals isn't working as well as it used to.

That's worthy of The Daily Show or the Colbert Report. You should phone that joke in. Props for Mrs. Pangloss!

30 posts in the science sections (General Discussion doesn't count). It keeps away political trolls who aren't really joining for the science.

The main problem with discussing religion here is that it's a supernatural subject being examined with methodology suited for natural subjects. Most religious claims can be debunked this way, but the core "belief" is in a deity that can't be observed. The religious blur the line by attempting to extend their faith outside the core belief, and the non-religious blur the line by attempting to extend their methodology into the core. The core belief is outside of science, until such time as God decides to become directly observable. When that happens, we'll start discussing Him. Until then, it's pointless in a science forum. We can allow a thread like "Do you believe in God", with a poll, but the answers can't be argued scientifically. It doesn't work.

nitric, can you please be more specific? Dangerous how? What is it you object to?