Ignorant question of the day - Is it likely one could expose themselves to radiation poisoning or get cancer from these activities? I ask, because the radiation generated by these devices is actually ionizing; but that's about the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

Exactly, get the f*ck away from that thing, that much radiation can't be good for you!

I have to strongly disagree with the suggestion that animals are killed and tortured for my "taste preferences" and "pleasure".

It gives me no pleasure that an animal has to die for me to eat. My pleasure in the consumption of that animal is a fleeting, automatic chemical reaction triggered in my body. In an evolutionary sense, i only receive this pleasure because it prolongs the survival of my species to feel it.

Most of these arguments reek of over simplification and ignorance to the reality of the society westerners live in.

In ideal conditions, i would eat meat from animals that i tended, who died of natural causes (mostly old age i assume) which i would personally butcher. In reality, it is not possible and even if it were possible for one person, it would not be possible for every person - we have limited space, limited resources, limits placed by law, limits on our time. As well as the cost of the land, I would have to hope enough animals died naturally to sell enough humane meat to pay taxes on the land and maintain my farming equipment, buy grain for the animals and so on. Or maybe i could grow my own grain and use primitive DIY tools, but then i'd probably need help for all the farming i'd have to do every day and now i'd need enough animals to die to feed three, so more land, more grain... Oops, it looks like this is getting complicated doesn't it. Shall we keep going until we reach a society of 70 odd million people, or should we consider that the problem is far more complicated than comments here would care to acknowledge?

Furthermore gluten is often the primary protein source for vegans, but i have a disease that requires me to avoid that protein in entirety. The smug, holier-than-thou field radiating from certain commenters here will i'm sure extend far enough to condescendingly say "ah, but you can be a vegan and avoid gluten, you poor, uneducated, smiling murderer!" Yes, and you could live your life without ever being touched by the sun's rays, or sail a small sailboat without ever getting wet, not even a droplet. And how can we know what effect gluten-free-veganism may have on public health when it is extended to a population of 7 billion? What a dangerous experiment to salivate over - reckless and potentially harmful in a way that a butcher could never hope to be.

It would be wonderful if the world was ideal. I wouldn't have this disease, and all people of the world could enjoy their own 10 acre farm and eat only those animals whose time had come. Unfortunately when i am abroad, away from home, the only source of protein that i can entirely trust might perhaps be a roast chicken. And i will eat it, the only true pleasure from which i take is that i will not spend the next three days doubled up in bed.

There are people worse off than me, but i don't know enough about their situation to use it as a point in this discussion. To people like me, the language used by some people here makes me think of someone dancing around at a diabetics convention shouting "I can't believe you losers have to use insulin! I hope you all realise that drug addicts use needles!"

I reject any notion that these people have a moral advantage over me. Have any of them ever heard of walking a mile in another man's shoes, or does their narrow mind only reach as far as "ME"?

By the way, plants are also alive. Or is this about sentient life? Shall we move on to abortion then, if non-sentient life is ok to end? Shall we have the philosophical discussion about degrees of sentience and types of sentience and whether we can even know if a plant has its own brand of sentience? If yes, let's try to at least do it without you being smug and in return without me being sarcastic.

Worrying about how people treat vegans? How about the language used to describe people who have no choice in the matter, lest that choice be never leave your own house and eat only this very small list of things which you may or may not find too disgusting to stomach? Am i to live in misery and squander my life so that a chicken could have an extra 2 years to run in circles? This issue is not fucking black and white despite the attempts to paint it so.

As he mentioned the problems are numerous and extremely difficult to solve. One of the problems he didn't mention was navigation. Stars are so far way that if the trajectory of the probe is off by even by a fraction of a fraction at the start of its journey it could miss its target by light years. Don't even get me started on interstellar radiation and the shielding technology we don't have.

Thanks for that, makes me feel better about getting them confused since the terminology is semi-fluid.

Seeing the disassembled Wankel engine in the video should have clued me in that that was NOT what was used in the P-47, which had lots of big cylinders for pistons radiating around a central point, hence the "radial" designation.

It (the video) was very helpful for figuring out how the chambers and path of the parts work in comparison to a piston engine, which is quite interesting even for someone like me who really only understands the rudiments of either design. Live and learn!

***update -- I was wrong about P-47 having a rotary engine, confused *radial* with rotary. Other than noting that mistake here, I'll leave my original comment unedited below (in which I draw erroneous conclusions based on that brain fart):

@eric3579 and @newtboy -

I was also quite interested in the "advantages" question. My grandfather was an armorer on P-47 "Thunderbolt" aircraft in WW2, and I knew that rotary engines were used in those.

Both of your answers tie in to the strengths of P-47s during the war. They were considered very reliable and resistant to damage (sorta like a WW2-era A-10; they could take a beating and make it back home). And of course, in internal combustion powered aircraft, power to weight ratio is even more important than in automobiles.

So, I'm sure that some of those strengths were at least partially due to the use of a radial engine. Not entirely, because other things in the design played a big role also -- like the fact that the P-47 engine was air cooled, so it didn't need a radiator system. As I understand it, comparatively light damage to a liquid-cooled aircraft like a P-51 that happened to damage the cooling system could disable or force them down for repairs... Not to knock the amazing piece of engineering that the Mustang was, but for sheer ability to take a beating and stay in the air, the Thunderbolt may have been the best US fighter in the war.

She's probably smiling too hard to even SEE the screen...

Also, that's not a CRT, where an electron gun is constantly firing radiation at your face. It's an LED or LCD flatscreen. If you think THOSE do damage, then I respectfully submit you stop reading this and print it out because your monitor uses the same tech.

As others have mentioned there are indeed still major issues to solve. But, they are slowly crawling to the answer (for some reason the US has just a "little bit" of interest in this--though if they go ahead and name their scientists as the sole awesomeness that thought how to make this a reality one day... I will truly hate my government for sure...

Hopefully, this reactor can give us some good data (and also hopefully was built with new processes across the board; again giving the scientists more data) on what's working better and what's failing either worse or @the same rate... There are about three main issues that need to be solved before we can call it "somewhat quits" (but, even after that, this would be a machine that needs a careful eye and constant monitoring).

I'm looking forward to the International Committee's Fusion Reactor in 2019~, called: ITER. It'll kind of be the "LHC" of the fusion world... They probably will figure out the issue with radiation destroying/eating away the guards/shields on the insides for the plasma.

These things are definitely awesome to see...

Actually, I understand exponential decay just fine thanks, and it's still nowhere close to 500 million years.

Besides, nuclear waste is a localised problem. Sure, it's pretty goddamn awful wherever it is, but carbon is a global problem. We can decide that say, Australia, should be a nuclear wasteland, and the rest of the world would be pretty much ok. It'd suck for the barrier reef though.

Radiation isn't really anything close to a "destroyer of worlds". Even around Chernobyl, there are still plants and animals living there.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wildlife-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-bears-wolves-rare-horses-roam-forests-1477124

This is absurd. Current pollution could wipe out our speices and maybe all the animals... but the planet would survive and could replenish. Cover the place in radiation for 500 million years and its screwed.

I'm not against new forms like the end of the video talks about but sticking the nuke drug into the problem with the hopes that maybe someday we will have a treatment is a stupid crack pipe dream.

What they said was that only black would survive the UV radiation, and they expect these ones to last about 10 years.

I would've liked more of an explanation than that myself, but haven't gone looking for one.

There's no way that's fuel. The truck wouldn't have been able to stop like that rolling over uber-slick diesel. That's radiator fluid. Makes sense, seeing as how it landed with the front end crashing down. Blew a tire either on the landing or the spin too.

What are the streaks that don't appear to originate at the piece of uranium? Other radiation sources?

Remember that Russian dissident who was killed with polonium? He died from internal alpha particle toxicity because his killers put it in his food. It's actually a good way to poison someone since alpha radiation is easily stopped by small amounts of tissue, thus collateral damage (such as to close personal contacts) is minimal. However internalization of an alpha source can result in severe local tissue damage.

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