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22nd September 2020, 09:45 PM | #1 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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Interesting science stories.
Occasionally, I come across interesting little science things that I don't really feel like making a new thread to poke at, so I'm making this thread as somewhere to share random cool or potentially interesting things.
For example, Mechanically robust lattices inspired by deep-sea glass sponges A significantly stronger and more resilient lattice form than the usual cross hatch. And... On Venus, mysterious traces of gas tease the possibility of extraterrestrial life Scientists are scouring the galaxy for "biosignatures" that could provide evidence of simple forms of life. They didn't expect to find one on our solar neighbor. Phosphine gas in quantities that are currently only explainable via the presence of life, in short. As an aside, after that news broke, Russia decided to claim that Venus is a Russian planet. |
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23rd September 2020, 01:20 AM | #2 |
Schrödinger's cat
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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27th November 2020, 05:30 AM | #3 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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“Holy Grail” Metallic Hydrogen Is Going to Change Everything
The substance has the potential to revolutionize everything from space travel to the energy grid. Potentially dramatically better rocket fuel and more useful superconductor.
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27th November 2020, 05:47 AM | #4 |
Maledictorian
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I only want a Space Elevator.
Is that too much to ask for? |
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27th November 2020, 06:47 AM | #5 |
Penultimate Amazing
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The article is from 2017. "Metallic hydrogen is predicted to be “metastable”". "The next step in terms of practical application is to determine if metallic hydrogen is indeed metastable."
So what's happened? Hmm. Metallic_hydrogen#Claimed_observation_of_solid_met allic_hydrogen,_2016WP Apparently not much. |
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27th November 2020, 07:20 AM | #6 |
Penultimate Amazing
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27th November 2020, 07:25 AM | #7 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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27th November 2020, 07:32 AM | #8 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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Got $10 Billion laying around to invest?
I say investment, though, because...
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27th November 2020, 10:18 AM | #9 |
The Clarity Is Devastating
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Has it been established that a space elevator would actually be possible to construct using materials we already know how to make? The last I heard, it was more speculative than that, requiring e.g. very long carbon nanotubes that are theoretically possible but not presently manufactured.
Ah, yes, the linked article says exactly that: 'That [making long graphenes] can’t be done yet, he says, adding that “it will be possible in the very near future."' |
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27th November 2020, 01:08 PM | #10 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Space elevator claims are mostly total loony-tune lies.
Total bollocks to claim 10 billion now. The same article claims current launch costs are $3,500 per pound. 10 billion is then just what it would cost to launch the materials for the first elevator. This assumes the elevator itself would be free. What possible justification is there for that? The materials needed don't currently exist. Materials that are currently cited as "coming close" now don't even remotely come close, usually don't come close in multiple ways, and any reasonable extrapolation of their cost exceeds 10 billion dollars. At the moment you have to absurdly generous with these extrapolations to even get down in to "just" billions of dollars for the materials. Loony toons. I've looked at these claims before. You can only justify that cost per pound if the elevator is nearly free and most of the cost is the energy to lift the payload to orbit. These low cost projections have a ton of unreasonable assumptions built in to them. Most near term claims for early space elevators call for ten ton payloads reaching GEO in a week. At $25 per pound that would be $5 million per week. It then takes 40 years to recoup the $10 billion investment cited in this article. And that, of course, requires that it be free to operate. The claims of space elevator proponents just do not stand any sort of scrutiny. Rockets actually do have a clear path to getting down to double digit per pound costs. And no new technology required. It's all a matter of supply and demand. The $3,500/pound cited by the article I quoted above has already been beaten by a factor of 3. The $25/pound that the article promises for some unlikely future elevator is the design goal of the SpaceX Starship*. Even if SpaceX doesn't meet that goal, it's still clear that the goal can be met and it's just a matter of someone demonstrating a need that justifies an assembly line approach to building rockets. * Someone might nitpick that I'm comparing a rate to LEO against a rate to GEO. But since once is based in reality and the other is based in fantasy and/or outright lies, I contend it's still a worthwhile comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_...stems_(rockets) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_...cle#Comparison |
29th November 2020, 01:59 AM | #11 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Well said, RY.
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30th November 2020, 08:23 AM | #12 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Here is one from last year that I thought was interesting but never started a thread for. They think this bone bed was created by the Chicxulub impact that killed off the dinosaurs.
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-millio...ng-meteor.html |
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30th November 2020, 10:57 AM | #13 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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30th November 2020, 01:54 PM | #14 |
Penultimate Amazing
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This one is a decade or so old now, but it's cool because it's both obvious and counterintuitive in it's scale.
There is enough ice in Greenland to raise sea levels ~6.5 meters or a little over 20 feet globally. There is so much ice that the force of gravity it exerts pulls the oceans towards Greenland. If this ice melts, therefore, the water being pulled towards Greenland will recede and within ~2000 miles of Greenland sea levels would actually fall and right at the Greenland coast sea levels could fall as much as 50 meters or ~160 feet. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016...el-some-places http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction...-rise-is-wrong |
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30th November 2020, 04:04 PM | #15 |
Дэлво Δελϝο דֶלְבֹֿ देल्वो
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Then let's hurry up & melt it all and bring back Doggerland!
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30th November 2020, 07:06 PM | #16 |
Penultimate Amazing
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The argument seems on its face to be possible. I'm certainly not qualified to comment. But it does not take into account the speed of melting with respect to that of isostatic rebound North America is still experiencing earthquakes from the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age (about 9,000 years ago).
I visualize a super slow tsunami. Rising oceans from the melt over decades followed, over the course of centuries, lowering due to the effect in question. |
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30th November 2020, 11:28 PM | #17 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Here's a cool one I found:
http://www.collectspace.com/news/new...aur-stage.html Apparently a rocket stage launched in 1966 has returned to a temporary orbit around earth, but will be leaving again soon. They figured out it was a rocket stage by calculating its backward trajectory. The animation of its orbit is pretty cool. You can see as it approaches earth that it passes in front of the moon. This slows its orbit down, allowing it to be captured into an earth orbit. But as it comes in for a second pass, it trails the moon, so the moon's gravity accelerates it, and it escapes again. 3 body orbital mechanics are not simple. |
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1st December 2020, 06:39 AM | #18 |
Penultimate Amazing
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"Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen" |
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1st December 2020, 09:28 AM | #19 |
Penultimate Amazing
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1st December 2020, 04:34 PM | #20 |
Illuminator
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'A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggardly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, superservicable, finical rogue;... the son and heir of a mongral bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."' -The Bard |
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6th December 2020, 01:39 AM | #21 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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Hmm.
Aging process in live animal tissues not just halted, but reversed I think that potential human immortality is probably still quite a ways off, but this has potential to help in ways that weren't available before, at the least. To take a snippet -
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6th December 2020, 08:31 AM | #22 |
Penultimate Amazing
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6th December 2020, 09:28 PM | #23 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Deepmind's AlphaFold2 has apparently "solved" portion folding.
I don't think it's as simple as that, but it seems they've made some major breakthroughs that could have implications for biomedical research, synthetic biology, and probably other things I'm not thinking of. My VPN won't connect at the moment so I'm not able to find an article on the subject, but I did have a window open with a YouTube video of Lex Fridman talking about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wJDJ56c88 I would appreciate it if someone else interested found an article on the subject, but my VPN should be working sometime soon so if not I'll post something in the next day or two. I did see an article titled something like "AlphaFold2 has not solved protein folding", so while this sounds like an important step, like most things of this nature it's also probably being overhyped in the media somewhat. ETA: Well, that was fast. My VPN connected. So here's a link to an article on nature.com: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4
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"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov |
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7th December 2020, 09:34 AM | #24 | |||
Penultimate Amazing
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Discussions of human immortality always remind me of this sketch:
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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17th March 2021, 09:12 PM | #25 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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"Artist's bracket" fungus helps turn wood into ... a generator of electricity
Not a powerful generator, of course, but even a small bit for a short time can work just fine as a trigger. |
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17th March 2021, 10:06 PM | #26 |
Nasty Woman
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17th March 2021, 10:14 PM | #27 |
Nasty Woman
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17th March 2021, 10:17 PM | #28 |
Nasty Woman
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17th March 2021, 10:37 PM | #29 |
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Tagger
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Imagine something that produces vibrations as a side effect of what it does. Like a diesel or petrol engine. You could put these things around it, not only will this dampen the vibrations, but generate electricity as well.
You could use this also in conjunction with springs in cars. |
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18th March 2021, 12:57 AM | #30 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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Possibly. I don't think that I saw anything in the article about the durability of the wood when prepared, though, and durability would be very important if it were to be applied in vehicles or any other constant use situation, I think, before getting to any space concerns.
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6th April 2021, 12:56 PM | #31 |
Penultimate Amazing
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6th April 2021, 08:23 PM | #32 |
Observer of Phenomena
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So take that quantum equation and recalculate the wave by a factor of hoopty doo! The answer is not my problem, it's yours. Three Word Story Wisdom |
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2nd July 2021, 12:18 AM | #33 |
Crazy Little Green Dragon
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This was a bit of an interesting story -
Superbugs have two new nemeses: the chestnut tree and LEGO Alternative approach to reducing danger from infections - preventing the bacteria from releasing toxins, which makes it much cleaner for an immune system to clean them up, with a fun little lego construct doing the job of a much, much more expensive piece of equipment as part of narrowing down the actually effective substance in play. |
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2nd July 2021, 07:38 AM | #34 |
No longer the 1
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As human right is always something given, it always in reality reduces to the right which men give, "concede," to each other. If the right to existence is conceded to new-born children, then they have the right; if it is not conceded to them, as was the case among the Spartans and ancient Romans, then they do not have it. For only society can give or concede it to them; they themselves cannot take it, or give it to themselves. |
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2nd July 2021, 07:51 AM | #36 |
Penultimate Amazing
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I believe carbon nanotubes and graphene have the theoretical required strength, and we can make them.
But there's two problems, which may not be surmountable (at least any time soon). First is that the quantities required are ginormous, and we don't know how to make nanotubes or graphene in such huge quantities. The second is that while these materials have the required strength at the microscopic level, we aren't going to be making multi-kilometer long nanotubes (as an example). So we would need to stitch together much shorter lengths of the stuff. And we can do that. But the strength of a bunch of stitched together nanotubes isn't the same as a bunch of continuous nanotubes. We don't know how strong we can make a collection of these things. I don't think what we can make now is strong enough. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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2nd July 2021, 08:01 AM | #37 |
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through a scribbled morning waving necessary ankles
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2nd July 2021, 08:33 AM | #38 |
Penultimate Amazing
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I wonder if that's even necessary.
Phobos's orbit is equatorial, meaning its orbital plane matches the equatorial plane. If you build your space elevator at a distance away from the equator, then your elevator won't be in the equatorial plane. You will have to deal with the fact that the elevator won't be quite vertical, but you only need a few degrees of tilt to get out of Phobos' path. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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2nd July 2021, 09:38 AM | #40 |
Penultimate Amazing
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It can (and will) if the base is to the side of the equator.
Putting the base at the equator is the simplest option because it makes the cable vertical. But it isn't strictly required. Consider the most extreme case: but the base at the pole, and have the cable start out running horizontal. It's obviously much harder to do that way, but the cable wouldn't come near the equator. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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