One can argue which universities in the world are the best, which metric to use etc, but higher education is not free in Europe. It is payed for with tax euros, or as in my case, tax kronor, as I got my education in Sweden. What you fail to understand is that students in Europe, in Sweden at least, take students loan too. There may not be tuition fees but students have to pay rent, eat, pay for books etc too you know. So while the total student loan amount in Sweden is generally smaller than in the U.S., students still have big loans in relation to expected future salaries. Very few are fortunate enough to go through higher education without student loans in Sweden.

That I made no comment on, I just happened to have the neutron cross sections in different Uranium isotopes at hand and used that as an example of how much the cross section can vary depending on the target material.

That is no entirely correct either. If the cross section was tiny then it would not transmute nuclei. The neutron cross section is dependent on both energy and the material. The interaction cross section of a 1 MeV neutron is about 1 barn in 235-U but only 0.01 barn in 238-U. And 1 barn is not tiny.

This is completely wrong. Neutrons are strongly interacting particles. If they weren't they would not stay bound in atomic nuclei. A statement like that implies that a particle only interacts via the weak interaction, which is not correct for nuetrons./p

What part of the fact that the Standard Model predicts this bound state at this mass did you not understand?

Except that there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. The Economics prize is a prize given by the Swedish "Fed", Riksbanken on honor of Nobel.

Do you have a hard time stomaching neutrinos too? When they were first proposed they could not be detected. Still they solved the very real problem of explaining the beta-decay spectrum.

This is all perfectly fine, for you. But why do you assume that everyone else is like you or think like you? I myself love watching movies. Not all movies, I do have my preferences. And it doesn't exclude having other hobbies as well.

Hey now, I'm a proud member of People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.

And you know this how? I know JF Salgado personally and he is by no standards a punk. He is in fact a very professional astronomer and visualizer. It may not be your style but that in no way means he is a punk.

You do realize that even CfA people aren't experts in all fields, right? Doing Fermi-LAT is very tricky in the Galactic plane and only maybe a handful of people in the LAT team know how to do it correctly. That being said, this result isn't necessarily wrong but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

From the article itself:

Me thinks you forgot to read the part about bouncing photons off the ions. The ions will be moving relative to the photons due to the vibrations.

Weakly interacting does not mean that it interacts via the weak interaction. That is why direct detection experiments look for elastic interactions between a dark matter particle and a nucleus in the experiment. This is why you have to minimize the background as much as possible.

Feinman? Surely you're joking, Mr Feynamn! Sorry just couldn't resist picking a nit.

I have to correct myself. This is not the upsilon meson, but it still is an established naming scheme and I still think that naming it some stupid name like "mystery doom particle" or something is just ridiculous.