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[Gentlefish]

Negative effective mass, not negative mass.

They engineered a dispersion relation in a Bose-Einstein condensate, producing a region of negative effective mass. That is, a region where particles interacted with other forces as if they had negative mass.

They did not actually produce particles with negative mass.

I mean, I did read the paper. But the effects are pretty awesome and I can't wait to see what sort of practical applications we can pull out of it later on down the line.

[Il Palazzo]

Well, we managed to pull off negative effective mass. Has some rather interesting properties, as to be expected.

Is that really something new? I thought I pulled off negative effective mass when I farted in bath, and the resultant bubble accelerated against the force of gravity.

[Max™]

...and thus we see how popular scientific articles end up backfiring.

[Il Palazzo]

Well, against the force of gravity, no, that wouldn't be new. Against other forces (such as electromagnetic force)? That's new.

I'm not into solid state, but don't electron holes have negative effective mass?

[Il Palazzo]

So, the interesting bit is not that they 'pulled off negative mass' but that they pulled off negative mass in a superfluid?

[Starver]

But is it anything like a helium balloon, held by a string by a kid in the back of a sharply cornering Ford Cortina?

Because that's the real question...

[Egan_BW]

FTL WHEN

[Starver]

It's a perfectly good standing question, though.

[Max™]

Pick Two:
a. Relativity
b. Causality
c. FTL

I prefer the route Baxter took with ditching causality to stories where they're zooping around at huge multiples of the speed of light and nobody seems to wonder why they don't just solve whatever super critical problem they're dashing across the galaxy to fix by plotting a course to an early enough event that they can just prevent it from happening entirely?

Though of all the handwaved explanations for why nobody does that, ones like Banks used where there's still a causal ordering because the hyperspace they hop through has a sheet (or grid) of energy they push off of to accelerate past c. So apparently trying to plot a course into your own past light cone would require heading across that sheet of ultra-death-fuck-off-energy-so-dangerous-pushing-a-bit-of-it-into-threespace-annihilates-anything-it-overlaps, a.k.a. gridfire.

[wierd]

Frog mucous highly effective at destroying influenza viral capsids; very low toxicity.

http://www.cell.com/immunity/abstract/S1074-7613(17)30128-0?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1074761317301280%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

[Bumber]

I guess licking toads is back in.

[wierd]

Frogs, not toads. 

[Reelya]

Toad doesn't actually have a specific definition in taxonomy, some frogs get called toads. It's a folk cultural term. Any frog that becomes adapted to land falls under the "toad" term, it includes members of 7 different frog genuses.

[Max™]

Just like turtles are tortoises in some languages, tortoises are only land dwelling chelonians in others, and turtles are only oceanic in some places.

[Sheb]

and turtles are only oceanic in some places.

Well, you can't be oceanic on firm land, can you? Of course they'll only be oceanic in the ocean.