Thunderf00t's Description (I am not Thunderf00t) Recently it has been widely covered in the media that ~70 members of the US 7th fleet are suing TEPCO (the company responsible for the Fukushima for THREE BILLION DOLLARS. On paper they claim all sorts of cancer, however I can find no interview of anyone with cancer. Further the lawsuit doesnt say what the claims are for. What I do find is interview after interview of people describing non-quantifiable symptoms that are wholly inconsistent with radiation poisoning. The thing that bugs me the most here is radiation is being sold as the 'invisible boogey man' that causes all the ills that you cannot otherwise explain. Sure radiation can cause some serious problems, but then again so can asbestos. But this does not mean you can blame any unaccounted for maladies on asbestos or radiation! In Africa when anything goes wrong (crop failures etc), there are those only too happy to blame witches. The only thing different here is the boogey man is radiation. Video describing effects of radiation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj6v8M... Many thanks to those who supported this video through Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/Thunderf00t

Thunderf00t's Description (I am not Thunderf00t) The hyperloop has all the hall marks of wishful thinking of dewey eyed dreamers sold by PR bullshit men who simply dont want to hear engineering reality. Im currently making a longer video debunking it, but this was just some fun I had this evening simulating the effects of a tube failure on someone in the hyperloop. A tube failure would likely kill everyone in the hyperloop. Getting hit by a 1 bar pressure wave travelling at nearly the speed of sound is fatal. Any who survive would find themselves in a 500km long metal tube in the dark. If you want to support the next video on the busting the hyperloop! https://www.patreon.com/Thunderf00t

Thunderf00t's Description (I am not Thunderf00t) If they invented the bicycle today.... it would be banned for being too dangerous..... Similarly with alcohol and tobacco! Just a little venting about the hysteria about half a dozen incidents involving 'hoverboards' so I wont be adding this to the patreon supported feed, but many thanks to all those who support this channel that way :-) https://www.patreon.com/Thunderf00t

Thunderf00t's Description (I am not Thunderf00t) NASA announced 'An Astrobiological finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life' http://www.sciencemag.org/content/ear... An astrobiological finding? Really? not just an interesting study of some extremophile bacteria in Mono Lake? While the results and the research are both interesting, the oversell in unjustified based on it. Specifically speculating about arsenate based DNA based on....... well not a lot really. Some EXAFS that shows little more beyond the model sensitive stuff kicks in that its tetracoordinate. Now they claim they can tell the difference between that and the AsO4 anion and its variants, but EXAFS is really pretty model dependent stuff for anything beyond the first shell. They also do some phenol-chloroform analysis and some other fairly standard biochemistry, all based on the assumption, which is a very shakey one, that IF they have arsenic DNA, then it will behave in a similar fashion to regular DNA. The irony is this woman, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, claims in the press conference to have read all the seminal paper etc etc including Watsons n Cricks paper on the structure of DNA, leading to the bloody obvious Q. why not just do the fiber diffraction patter, then QED. I mean IF they have what they say, its a crystallographers wet dream with all those heavy atom substitutions! A lot of the oversimplistic view of biochemistry really rubbed me up the wrong way. Getting overly worked up about which chemicals are present and which ones are not seems kinda trivial. The work in itself is interesting enough without this sort of claim, the more so as this facile overview of biochemistry is only much use for noobs. I mean if this trivial stamp collecting is what NASAs into, you can substitute Se for S in many proteins, and indeed the crystallographers love this sort of heavy atom substitution.... should we call a press conference of astrobiology for this too? Similarly for various ion substitutions. Loads of the technical detail of the paper bugged me too, the way they always refer to phosphate and arsenate explicitly as the 3- ions, even when they are incorporated into molecular structures. They classification of the phosphate and arsenate species present also represented significant biochemistry thinking. Looks like most the basisity of the solution comes from the carbonate, but some sort of estimate of the various concentrations of the various protonation states of the oxyanion in these solutions would have been nice (relatively trivial to calculate). Basically saying what you gurgled into these solutions is not as useful as what exists in the solutions you used. Finally I have grave doubts about the premature nature of this data, and couldnt help but feel the shadow of Pons and Fleischman. Big PR announcements that turn out to be bogus just undermine the publics confidence in science, when civilization needs it as never before. I sincerely hope Felisa is right here, for all our sakes. If I was asked what my estimate of an organism being able to absorb this sort of structural shock in a few generation going from an entirely phosphate based backbone to arsenate (given that this will mostly likely have BIG effects in both histone binding, and transcription, the factors that determine the production of proteins) I would be giving it a chance (generously) in the few percent range. Biochemistry is REALLY picky over structure.