Radical Edward

killing one person after another, surely? black humour aside, I would suspect that it is something derived from the individual act of killing, perhaps some kind of satisfaction in ridding the world of someone they do not like, or sexual gratification, or perhaps even some twisted sense of "doing the right thing" as I would suspect in the case of Harold Shipman. As with all things to do with the human mind though, It will be a mixture of nature and nurture.

actually it does expand a heck of a lot. The amount of light they pick up is absolutely miniscule. The reason for this is the diffraction limit. I won't go into this in depth, but basically, for an aperture of diameter D, the maximum angle (in radians) that it can resolve is approximately Theta = 1.22(lambda)/D where theta is the angle, lambda is the wavelength of the light and D is the diameter. now the angle seems pretty small, but when you plug that angle into a triangle for which the adjacent side to the angle is the earth-moon distance, you will find that the opposite side (i.e. the diameter on the moon) is absolutely huge, and even bigger on a round-trip back to the earth. I did this for an aperture of 1m in diameter (quite large for a laser) and a wavelength of 550nm, and by time it gets to the moon, it is about 13km across.

young's slits is quite easy to do at home - here's how you do it. take a piece of glass, like a microscope slide or something, and then put it over a candle flame (a reasonable distance so that it doesn't crack or anything) to blacken it. Then scrape away a very thin line. shine a laser through it, and project it against a wall, you should see a diffraction pattern, that is, a bright central line, and just next to it a darker kine, and next to that a darker line still. now if you scratch a second very thin line close to that one, you see the same pattern as before, but now you see nodes of light imposed on that one (like you are chopping the original pattern into slices). Looking at the distance between the bands of light, you can work out the distance between the slits if you know the wavelength of the light ( a standard red laser that you can buy is usually about 600nm or so) . I will leave this to you - just do it with basic trigonometry. Young's slits is just the 2 slit version of a diffraction grating, which is the same thing, but with an awful lot of slits.

are you saying that identical twins do not exist?

That sound is tinnitus. There could be a number of reasons for it. (1) just getting is. Ok this is a hand off answer, but some people just do get it inexplicably. (2) damage to the inner ear as a result of sound. This can persist for some good time after the loud sound (3) blood flow problems in the inner ear. This basically damages the inner ear (4) examples I don't know about. I suggest that if it becomes persistant or annoying at all, then you go and get your ears checked out. I have this problem as well, due to illness and a genetic problem with my ears. I am not saying you have this, but it might just be worth getting checked if it becomes a problem.

that pert was right, the rest was a little off though. Iam not so sure whether the tornado example reallz works, but it could be a gyroscope effect, I will have to think about that. The real reason that a gyroscope turns slowly around an axis perpendicular to the ground (parallel to gravity) is to do with torque on the body. The following site explains it quite nicely, so I won't go into it in more detail here. http://www.howstuffworks.com/gyroscope.htm

memes.

because they are not attached to the same rigid straight pole. Just try it, you'll see what I mean.

easy win: take an iron bar and a nice long piece of wire, wrap the wire around the bar and then connect the diode to the wire and go and sit it next to an electricity substation. It will flicker at 50Hz unless you rig up a cunning array of diodes and capacitors, but it will work as long as the LED lasts.

not really, there are many broadband laser sources too, such as dye lasers (really nasty carcinogenic stuff some of them, comes in big cans that say do not eat on the side), NdYAG (Neodinium Yttrium Aluminium Garnet) lasers and so on. These are extremely important in short pulse lasers where you need a wide frequency range in order to compress the pulse. They are also used in tunable lasers too, which are often seen in those big outdoor laser shows. The collimation of a laser is more to do with how the laser is formed: essentially to amplify the light significantly you need to mirrors facing one another (the mirrors are generally concave, but you can get away with other mirror arrangements if you are careful and know what you are doing) which means that the beam has to bounce back and forth inside the cavity for a long time (well, a long time for the light anyway) before it is emitted.

photons (everything actually) have both particle, and wave like properties. One can say thay are like a wave that acts in quanta (discrete interactions) - it doesn't really swap between one and the other as implied above. This is of course very strange and unfamiliar to us, but then all of quantum mechanics is. Onto Lasers. The acronym is: "Light Amplification by the Simulating Emission of Radiation" Essentially there are 2 ways that an excited electron can decay to it's ground state: one is "spontaneous emission" which is effectively randome, and the other is "stimulated emission" which is when the intensity of the light field is so strong, that the electron is forced to drop into the ground state and emit a photon. This causes the light to be both amplified (since the strong field forces more photons to be emitted, which makes the field stronger and so on. This effect is achieved in a cavity resonator - basically a lasing medium between two mirrors. The most notable quality of laser light is that it is coherent; all the waves are in phase with one another. Lasers are often near-monochromatic, but not always, and often, but not always polarized. They are generally fairly well collimated too, though only to the diffraction limit - so tiny lasers will spread alot faster than big ones. There are a few other clever things about lasers, for example one can only lase a medium when one achieves population inversion - that means there are more excited electrons than unexcited ones. This is thermodynamically troublesome, since conventionally you can only have an even split between the two (in steady state) though you can play tricks by using a multilevel laser. I appreciate alot of this will be a bit complicated, so if you have more questions on the terms I used or anything, feel free to ask.

I get a blank image.

I have to ask, what is "you". As has been pointed out, this is a question of free will in many ways. So let us take a decision and think about what prior things can affect that decision. One set of things is caused, i.e. past events and so on lead you to a state where you make a decision, and another is random, i.e. fafalone's postulate that quantum mechanics might push the neurons over the brink in some way. Neither of these are controlled. What other options are there? Even any "supernatural" hypothesis would just follow the same rules, of caused or random.

well the EM signals are basically the result of the polarization, depolarization and action potentials of the neurons, which act in nice rythmic patterns under certain circumstances. and it is those we pick up.

the action of specific neurons or sets of neurons would create an eletromagnetic field, however it does not follow that copying an electromagnetic field would induce the action of a specific set of neurons. Furthermore, the detected fields would only be the crudest representations of the complex 3D topologies of the real field. A rough analogy might be to say that we use a lens to project an image of the countryside onto a screen, but copying that image, putting a light behind the image and putting the lens back will not recreate the countryside.

I guess a high dosage would be effective too.

yeap, the total angular momentum of the system would be zero and it would fall over.

wouldn't this coincide with a recording mechanism that started every time we had an attention response in the brain. Interestingly this attention response is also seen in flies. I have a fascinating article in the New Scientist about this.

completely wrong.... 1) Goldfish are FISH, and ALL Ninjas are MAMMALS. 2) Ninjas are not appropriate to a scientific experiment because they can flip out at any time. I once saw a ninja flip out and kill a whole room full of scientists, just because one of them was cleaning a petri dish.

neanderthal man is not really an example of parallel evolution, since it started from a very similar stock. The question I suppose is over whether evolution from two completely independent start points would end up the same. Personally I doubt it - There are a number of attributes of our physiologies that are there for largely historical reasons, for example the bone structure in the ear is a derivation of the reptillian jaw bones via the therapsid line, and our tooth arrangement is also related to this. Having a joint food/wind pipe may well not happen again (though looking at early organisms I can see it happening in a similar way. Furthermore, many of our traits are neotenic characteristics, and it is questionable whether those would arise again. I would imagine that other advanced life forms would be chordates, and perhaps even vertebrates, but this is for practical reasons in the early organisms, where being a chordate is very useful, and allows certain flexibilities not really seen in other symmetries. How many legs/appendages they have though I would suspect would vary quite significantly.

no, Mutations occur in germ line cells, that is, in one of the ovum or sperm that made you. The mutations are random, and then selected for via selective pressures, generally before breeding age.

oh look: human--chimp--gorilla--orang utan. I always think that is a great picture. ok, so the hybrid might not survive very long, but it might still be carried to term though. I have tried looking up monosomy 2 and couldn't find much.

precisely what do you plan to do with these bacteria once you have grown them? I can't see you doing much, and you stand a high chance of growing something nasty. So like injecting things into yourself, I suggest you don't.

this is stupid. don't do it.

like in Horses and Zebra perhaps? or Horses and Donkeys? How about lion and tigers, and false whales/dolphins? When we look at the karyotypes of the different horse varieties there are much larger differences than between humans and chimps. The difference is not so much the magnitude of the differences, but the specificities. Is there anything in the sperm/egg function or the embryological formation of a chimp/human hybrid that would render it inviable?