> charged particles traveling faster than the speed of light in water What did I just read?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
The particles are still moving slower than Relativity's limit, the speed of light in a vacuum.
A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
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Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#52> charged particles traveling faster than the speed of light in water What did I just read?
Cherenkov Radiation [1]. It's not because the particles are going faster than 300M m/s, but because light in the medium is going less than 300M m/s. The unbreakable "speed of light" is actually, the "speed of light (in a vacuum)". Outside of a vacuum, the light is slowed by the materials it travels through (see prisms, angles of refraction, Snell's Law [2] etc.). But it's still a very special condition when the medium slows light to some large fraction of C, while particles are going faster than that (but still less than C).
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#53> charged particles traveling faster than the speed of light in water What did I just read?
That phrase can be parsed in two ways
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you expect that treatment to be free?
If the cost of editing is not exorbitant (i.e. is lower than the average per-capita cost of paying for the condition being edited away), healthcare providers would be incentivized to pay for the editing to reduce their costs. The incentives are obviously stronger in single-payer countries, but even in the US you could imagine an insurance company that competed on lower premiums conditional upon certain gene edits bei…
> in the US you could imagine an insurance company that competed on lower premiums conditional upon certain gene edits being applied to covered children.
On one hand, this sounds entirely economically reasonable (and even humanitarian).
On the other hand, I fear this would inevitably produce unintended consequences that would shape our society in distopian, sci-fi/horror-flavored ways.
I have no idea how it would actually shake out. Maybe I'm just being anti-intellectual here.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#55Anyone with insight on this I read years ago: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the...
I worry that that if Thorium reactors become very very common because they are thought to be very safe (e.g. behind your house common, as some have bragged), but they turn out to be dangerous...we will have a real problem.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and we're stuck in 1980-and-earlier carriages for anything not an ICE or regio trains. Actually, the InterCity and EuroCity fleet was just entirely replaced. This means the entire fleet – S, Region, InterCity, EuroCity, InterCityExpress – is now replaced, or being replaced, with modern stock.
Offtopic but this means I am totally heading back to ride the new trains :-)
Here the new stock:
InterCity/EuroCity: https://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/zug/fahrzeuge/ic_2.shtml
InterCityExpress 4 (to replace major InterCity routes, and minor InterCityExpress routes): http://www.deutschebahn.com/de/bahnwelt/start_ice4/das_proje...
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#57What's up with this image caption? "The inside of the Petten test reactor where the thorium salt is being tested is shining due to charged particles traveling faster than the speed of light in water." As I understand it, nothing travels faster than the speed of light. The author is mistaken, right?
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Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#58As far as I know the Chinese are also putting much effort into this type of reactor.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#59Better explanation here (linked from Technology Review): http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/news/finally-worlds-first-... More details on the experiment sequence: https://public.ornl.gov/conferences/MSR2016/docs/Presentatio... This is not actually a reactor test because the thorium-bearing salt does not attain criticality. It's a sequence of materials tests using thorium-containing salt mixtures in small crucibles ins…
Comments like this are why I don't bother getting my tech & science news from anywhere but HN.
I've seen an increase in the number of NLP bots that give snippets, but they're far from consistently being accurate. Are there any services that can give you summations like this, kind of like the WSJ's What's News section?
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comments like this are why I don't bother getting my tech & science news from anywhere but HN.
I've seen an increase in the number of NLP bots that give snippets, but they're far from consistently being accurate. Are there any services that can give you summations like this, kind of like the WSJ's What's News section?
Coverage isn't great, but these two have managed to get in to my bookmarks:
I seem to recall a similar weekly service for HN but I can't recall the name of it.