Moontanman

I think it's reasonable to say that birds did at one time have a tail fin, they had long tails that dangled down to provide stability, it didn't stick up like a airplane but it served the same purpose and it was lost in the evolutionary struggle at the K/T extinction and only birds with the rudimentary tails they have today made it through that bottle neck, the birds that all modern birds descended from lost their tails, possibly due to better brains, so they no longer needed them?

I read the link, the experimenter seems to be saying that the hypothesis is that salt water will cool faster than freshwater. I think this is flawed, salt water is denser than fresh and so a liter of salt water would be heavier than a liter of fresh so the salt water should cool slower. The salt water should cool slower due to evaporation from the salt water being slower than evaporation of fresh water as well.

What! You don't believe the oil from the rare Rocky Mountain cliff diving turtle will make your hair shine like the sun... shame on you for rejecting capitalism... snake oil has been a big part of our reality for a very long time, it used to be a lot worse and the idea of buyer beware was your only protection. Now there are at least rules that (mostly) keep them from being able to make dangerous claims but I agree using a model for beautiful hair who's hair has probably been that way since birth and using her good genes to sell a product by claiming the product will make your hair look as good as hers is despicable.

It was a complement Phylis, and I agree, family is a huge part of what makes us who we are and if your Dad beat your Mom then his sons will be likely to do the same thing and his daughters will tend to seek out abusive men. Blaming it all on the Mom seems to me at least to be simply more of blaming the woman for what the man does.... I knew it was Momma's fault

I'm not sure how much real science is involved in this study but what about the Dads? Dads can have a huge influence for good or bad on their kids, nice pic btw, you remind me of my Mom.....

A cool link, i didn't know there was missing baryonic matter, cool to know for sure.

I don't know about you Marat but i think I'm a bit of a Wiener,,,,,

The Casimir effect used to create photons! http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-researchers-create-light-from-almost.html

Absolutely awesome! I really want to see if anti-matter is the same in all ways as matter, gravity, spectrum, this is really heady stuff to me.... So many questions

I think this is reasonable evidence that elephants have and need a culture similar to the way humans have and need culture and the culture of chimps, whales, and some other animals. I am defining culture here was behavior that is not transmitted through our genes but through adults teaching children who have extended childhoods and cannot survive well if at all with out this information, this information tells them how to behave, where food and water is at different times of the year, any complex information they do not get via simply being what ever animal they are and has to be passed from adults to children and to their children on and on. I think it is part of the reason animals with complex cultures tend to have large brains and intellegence. I would like to question the idea that Elephants and rhinos get along, in the wild they are not exactly pals, Elephants are quite intelligent creatures live in large, long term family groups and generally do not harass other animals that leave them alone, rhinos on the other hand are dangerous, irritable, and apt to charge and gore almost anything, elephants included. Elephants are sometimes killed by rhinos, in the wild Elephants give rhinos a wide berth. I have honestly never heard of the opposite happening. How about a link to this info? Can you be a bit more clear on the unusual sexual behavior?

I've often wondered why some words seem to incite such a horrific response under some conditions and illicit quite another under different conditions when the words basically mean the same thing. I have in my life whispered the so called F bomb into womens ears with certain words before and after it and received quite a different response than when I've said the same word to the same women with different words before or after it even though none of the extra words were in any way bad or demeaning. I mean if the word F--k p-ss-s you off when it's said one way why not the other and why if i smash my finger and SHOUT F--K! I get a completely different response than if for instance a I loose my pen and just say f--k out loud? F--k is a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word, why is it hated so much? Frak it! BSG for those of you who are not literate in science fiction vernacular. Remember shoot is just shit with two o's How about "rapports sexuels" nah, doesn't quite have the same ambiance, maybe baiser?

I once read that the sun would expand and sterilize the earth before enough hydrogen from our planet could be fused to make a measurable difference in the amount of water in the ocean or some similar thing and that is probably pretty close to being correct. The main thing to remember about hydrogen fusion is that it does release neutrons and will cause other things to become radioactive so in the long term it is not much better than fission as far as waste is concerned, well the fusion waste probably wouldn't be as nasty as the waste from fission but there would still be a lot of it... except of course for aneutronic fusion, which perversely would use helium3 as it's fuel and produce no particle radiation and "could" skip the entire turning heat into motion and then into electricity cycle all other power plants rely on. The perversity of this is that helium3 is practically non existent on the Earth but occurs in a more reasonable quantity on the Moon! Don't ya just love it when a plan.... well lets just say doesn't quite come together. lol BTW a link was posted in another thread that has very good graphics and explains nuclear energy quite well and if it is correct Canada already has reactors that can operate on thorium... http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/57643-nuclear-energy-infographic/page__pid__610859#entry610859

Great link, good graphics, thanks for posting it.

How thin would this one metric ton of neutronium have to be for it to be one square meter?

I have a seafood addiction, i see food and i want to eat it! It's more difficult to stop eating once it gets out of hand than many people seem to realize. I eat late at night for some reason but seldom during the day, addiction is weird, hard to understand unless you have been there.

Yes but it would be an incredibly trivial amount, just a few hundred kilos, at most, of hydrogen fused would be enough to power the entire USA power grid. I don't know where his mind has taken him on this but that one thing is so inaccurate it's difficult to really go any further with the discussion he is presenting.

JCP, you are spreading so much crap here it's difficult to deal with it all, from non science opinion sources to sources that are nothing but political action groups, to sources that assume 1950's level technology, to some sources that don't even seem connected to your argument. You keep talking about just wanting to represent the facts but you are not being honest in your "discussion" style at all but the idea that a power plant uses up water is the biggest piece of male bovine excrement you have raised and the most obviously false. yes the water evaporates, some of it, but not even a major percentage of it, most of it is just recycled in some way from cooling towers to cooling lakes and ponds but the amount lost is trivial and it also rains back down elsewhere often quite close by. You cannot show that nuclear power plants significantly increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, if they did they would be a source of global warming not a possible solution! Nuclear power plants or coal or hydro for that matter do not "use up" water! If you want to debate any of the rest of this stuff you must stop out right lying! The idea that power plants use water in a way that make it unusable by anyone else is simply not true, not true by any stretch of the imagination.

Beg all you want but your data is flawed and incomplete. You've made several assertions here, how about showing some evidence for them? Your link ignores fast breeder reactors and assumes all reactors run on U235, which is a tiny part of the uranium on the earth. Your link also ignores thorium and plutonium. You may have a point, considering your own misrepresentation of the facts I suggest you consider your own agenda. It does seem unlikely, just like coal fired plants were once rare and as were hydro electrical dams rare at one time. but nuclear has the potitntial to generate far more power than coal or hydro. In some places solar is great, not so great in others, as an example, solar and or wind power is far more vulnerable to weather than nuclear or coal or hydro. This is trivially falsified, water used by hydro, coal, or nuclear is not too polluted to use and should not be polluted at all. I live near a nuclear power plant, they use huge volumes of water so does the local coal power plant as well this water is either recycled through cooling lakes or released back into the ocean, the water so used is not contaminated or harmful in any way. They are not connected in the way that you suggest, in fact your suggestion that water used to take away waste heat from any power plant or used to make electricity via a dam is unusable for other things is simply not true and is suggestive that you have an agenda that is not being honestly shown here. And this supports your assertions in what way exactly? I agree, and I suggest you take your own suggestion to heart...

In your video you seem to be suggesting some quite improbable events, can you give us a written description of exactly what you are suggesting? I once read of a idea that asserted that Mars was once the moon of a large terrestrial planet that orbited where Mars is now, somehow (the mechanism was unclear) the primary planet was destroyed and most of the material was ejected from the solar system (the rest became the asteriods) and Mars went into independent orbit around the sun. Your video seems to suggest Mars got close enough to Jupiter to have it's atmosphere stripped away, i would think this would result in the complete destruction of Mars and the resulting debris being added to Jupiter.

That is a man made scarcity. No, actually they produce less waste that has to kept stored for much less time than regular reactors and they operate with elements than cannot be used to make nuclear weapons, think thorium, and they use up the stuff that can be used to make nuclear weapons. I'm not sure what you mean by this? Do you actually think that hydroelectric or nuclear uses water that somehow vanishes after it makes electricity? Some sort of population control will eventually happen... Again quite thinking about U235 and the tiny amount of it available to us and think thorium, U238, plutonium, and fast breeder reactors, while not limitless nuclear is quite capable of sustaining our entire civilization if we wanted it to and for a very long time.

I'm going to have to go with the law on this one, if you were speeding then pay the fine and go on with your life. I was clocked as going in excess of 125 mph once on my Motorcycle (I was really going well over 135, not a lot of time at that speed to really keep track of your speed) when I saw the glint of chrome on the side of the road, way up ahead, that warned me some one was sitting under the over pass i was about to go through, I grabbed the brakes just as I was in range but I was doing 128mph by the time I was close enough to register on his radar. I just pulled over and stopped. got off my bike and waited on him to come and get to me. He just cited me for 69 in a 55 to keep me from loosing my license, 15mph over the speed limit was automatic revocation of your drivers license where I was caught at the time, (he said he could have taken me to jail right then) but since I didn't make him chase me (and he rode bikes too) he cut me a break, if he cited you for speeding and you were speeding don't quibble about a few mph and pay the fine and the insurance costs and be more "attentive" to the speed limits from now on or at least until the ticket drops off your record. You are likely to be spending more money to fight the ticket than you will gain by beating it and the cop has a difficult and necessary job keep idiots like me from killing themselves.... or others... But I do agree that local courts (often anyway) should have a kangaroo as a mascot.... But if you weren't actually speeding and have the time and money to do it then fight the good fight, never give up! (the court system needs your money)

While the question wasn't personal in the sense I really didn't want to know how much it would take to prostitute your self you gave the only rational answer anyone could give. We all prostitute ourselves in some manner for money or power or what ever we desire. Pornography, or at least being paid to make it is no different than any other form of exchanging work for our own benefit. Few people seem to see there is no real difference between sexual prostitution and any other kind other than what we learn culturally. I think the most threatening thing about prostitution is not that it's immoral or some how "more wrong" than digging a ditch but it's certainly more profitable when you compare the effort involved and I think there in lies the rub for most people. It takes power away from men and our ability to make money "honestly" and allows women to make money easier and faster than the "honest labor" of a man who would take care of them through his "honest" labor. I think this is more threatening to men than women in general but the rub is always that it's too easy to do (I question this) and that only the lazy or immoral would do such a low thing to make money. Of course the idea that sex is "low" is religious in it's origin and only fallen women would do such a thing. While I wouldn't recommend a woman take up sexual prostitution (say because she is so pretty men would pay highly for her favors) as a way to live i wouldn't recommend ditch digging to some guy just because he is large and strong either, but any judgment on the moral standing of either profession is artificial. Almost anything, in our society, that takes power away from men is seen as threatening to the morals of our society. This was much worse in the past when about the only honest job for a woman was as a school teacher and her only other choices was to marry a man who could take care of her or be a whore....

I think i could agree on some level there is an organizing force in the universe, it is demonstrably true that order does arise from chaos but i see no sign of creativity or intellegence....

Lemur, I asked you a question a few posts back that you did not answer, it was not rhetorical, what you would do for money? If you have limits, why are those limits more important than other limits? I'll expand on this if you will answer my question. How much money would it take for you to "prostitute" your self?

Deep-Earth devil worms A newly identified species of nematode lives miles deep in the tight, hot crevices of the Earth's crust Halicephalobus mephisto Property of the University Ghent, Belgium - Gaetan Borgonie Scientists have identified a new species of microscopic worms living in the ground below South African mines, isolated from fracture water gushing up from miles below the Earth's surface. It is the first multicellular organism to be found at such depths. The discovery of the tiny nematode (named Halicephalobus mesphisto after Mephistopheles, a literary nickname for the Devil), published in this week's issue of Nature, challenges the assumption that deep subsurface ecosystems cannot support multicellular life and may have implications in the search for life on other planets. Read more: Deep-Earth devil worms - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/58187/#ixzz1O92kgkxm