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Old 31st December 2018, 07:59 AM   #41
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Originally Posted by TheGnome View Post
Would you have a link or something to support this? Just offhand I plain don't believe this.

Most of what you call static is thermal noise generated in the receiver. Very little is picked up by the antenna as you could see when you disconnected it.

Also I think there is only little background radiation from the Big Bang in the VHF and UHF range (up to about 1 GHz) that could be picked up by a TV receiver.

I would be quite interested if you could prove me wrong. That would be one more thing I didn't get.
NASA good enough for you?

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe...ackground.html
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:01 AM   #42
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Originally Posted by kellyb View Post
How does that work?
I actually think it's wrong as he stated it, but something like it is true.

He said:
Quote:
If you were to disassemble a man into his constituent atoms and then weigh those atoms, they would be about the same weight as the man. But if you disassembled the atoms into protons, neutrons and electrons and weighed each of those, they would only weigh about 5% of the guy.
The mass of an atom is very close to the mass of the protons + neutrons + electrons. The binding energy isn't that high compared to the masses of those particles, so while it's a measurable portion of the mass, it's certainly not 95% of it. Actually, thinking about it the mass of, say, Helium is less than the mass of it's constituent particles, which is why you can get energy out of the fusion of hydrogen into helium. And each element up to Iron has less mass/particle than the ones before it (which is why you can keep getting energy out as you go up the periodic table up to Iron), so if anything the elements in your man will weigh more when disassembled into their component particles, not less. That extra mass is the energy that it took to disassemble them.

However, something like what he said is true, not of the atoms, but of the nucleons: if you were to disassemble the protons and neutrons (somehow?) into their constituent quarks, on the other hand, then you'd find that most of the mass was missing. Because the mass of a proton really is mostly in the form of the binding energy (the gluons I guess), and the quarks' mass makes up a small proportion of the total.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:09 AM   #43
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
I actually think it's wrong as he stated it, but something like it is true.

He said:


The mass of an atom is very close to the mass of the protons + neutrons + electrons. The binding energy isn't that high compared to the masses of those particles, so while it's a measurable portion of the mass, it's certainly not 95% of it. Actually, thinking about it the mass of, say, Helium is less than the mass of it's constituent particles, which is why you can get energy out of the fusion of hydrogen into helium. And each element up to Iron has less mass/particle than the ones before it (which is why you can keep getting energy out as you go up the periodic table up to Iron), so if anything the elements in your man will weigh more when disassembled into their component particles, not less. That extra mass is the energy that it took to disassemble them.

However, something like what he said is true, not of the atoms, but of the nucleons: if you were to disassemble the protons and neutrons (somehow?) into their constituent quarks, on the other hand, then you'd find that most of the mass was missing. Because the mass of a proton really is mostly in the form of the binding energy (the gluons I guess), and the quarks' mass makes up a small proportion of the total.
Oh, wow. That's really complicated and interesting.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:19 AM   #44
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Quantum tunneling actually happens

As a moving particle approaches a barrier it can’t cross, uncertainty in its position means there is a chance it will already be on the other side of said barrier and keep moving as if the barrier didn’t exist at all.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:25 AM   #45
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One of my favourites is that if you look at a spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
<--------------------

And look at another spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
--------------------->

You will be looking at two points that are (well, were) much closer to each other than they are to you.

point 1 <----------13 billion light years------------- you -------------13 billion light years------------> point 2

Weird right?
In fact, I think those two points are actually only tens of millions of light years apart, but don't quote me on that.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:27 AM   #46
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
I actually think it's wrong as he stated it, but something like it is true.

He said:


The mass of an atom is very close to the mass of the protons + neutrons + electrons. The binding energy isn't that high compared to the masses of those particles, so while it's a measurable portion of the mass, it's certainly not 95% of it. Actually, thinking about it the mass of, say, Helium is less than the mass of it's constituent particles, which is why you can get energy out of the fusion of hydrogen into helium. And each element up to Iron has less mass/particle than the ones before it (which is why you can keep getting energy out as you go up the periodic table up to Iron), so if anything the elements in your man will weigh more when disassembled into their component particles, not less. That extra mass is the energy that it took to disassemble them.

However, something like what he said is true, not of the atoms, but of the nucleons: if you were to disassemble the protons and neutrons (somehow?) into their constituent quarks, on the other hand, then you'd find that most of the mass was missing. Because the mass of a proton really is mostly in the form of the binding energy (the gluons I guess), and the quarks' mass makes up a small proportion of the total.
Similarly the atoms should weigh a very very small amount more(?) then the person due to differences in chemical energy. This would be truly tiny amount of mass though.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:29 AM   #47
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- The counter-intuitive solution to the Monty Hall / Three Prisoner problem.
- The Birthday Paradox
- The fact that if you well shuffle a standard deck of cards you've with near certainty created an order of cards that have never before appeared in the universe.
- The Banach-Tarski Paradox
- The Zipf Phenonoma
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:31 AM   #48
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
One of my favourites is that if you look at a spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
<--------------------

And look at another spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
--------------------->

You will be looking at two points that are (well, were) much closer to each other than they are to you.

point 1 <----------13 billion light years------------- you -------------13 billion light years------------> point 2

Weird right?
In fact, I think those two points are actually only tens of millions of light years apart, but don't quote me on that.
I thought the 2 points would be about 45 billion light years apart? IOW the size of the visible universe is ~45 billion light years across even though we can see ~13 billon light years in any given direction.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:37 AM   #49
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Originally Posted by lomiller View Post
I thought the 2 points would be about 45 billion light years apart? IOW the size of the visible universe is ~45 billion light years across even though we can see ~13 billon light years in any given direction.
I think from the "well, were" comment that he means you're seeing them as they existed 13 billion years ago.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:44 AM   #50
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Originally Posted by Guybrush Threepwood View Post
Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than with you or me.

Is there any real evidence for that?
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:50 AM   #51
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Originally Posted by Guybrush Threepwood View Post
Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than with you or me.
There's no real evidence for this, but it is scientific fact.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:53 AM   #52
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Originally Posted by RecoveringYuppy View Post
I think from the "well, were" comment that he means you're seeing them as they existed 13 billion years ago.
Yeah. lolmiller is certainly right that those two points are both much further away from us now than 13 billion light years, and also much further away from each other.

But we aren't seeing them now. We see two points, separated in the sky by 180 degrees, as they were 13 billion years ago. And at that time they were very* close together.

*Relatively speaking, anyway.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:55 AM   #53
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The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever existed.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:56 AM   #54
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Polar bears, even if they're starving, don't eat penguin eggs.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:58 AM   #55
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Originally Posted by Mojo
Originally Posted by Guybrush Threepwood View Post
Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than with you or me.

Is there any real evidence for that?

Well, no. But it is a scientific fact.


ETA, should have read page two before replying.

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Old 31st December 2018, 08:59 AM   #56
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Humans use about 1/3 of all energy captured by photosynthesis on the earth.

This takes into account agriculture, lumber, fishing, etc.

I may be misremembering that number, but it was something like that. I read it in E O Wilson's Diversity of Life, which, IIRC was written in the 90s, so if anything it's probably higher now.
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Old 31st December 2018, 08:59 AM   #57
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Oh, and if we count History as a science, this one always gets a "really?" from people who don't already know it - Oxford University was a fully-fledged university compete with halls of residence nearly 100 years before the origination of Aztec society.
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Old 31st December 2018, 09:00 AM   #58
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
One of my favourites is that if you look at a spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
<--------------------

And look at another spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
--------------------->

You will be looking at two points that are (well, were) much closer to each other than they are to you.

point 1 <----------13 billion light years------------- you -------------13 billion light years------------> point 2

Weird right?
In fact, I think those two points are actually only tens of millions of light years apart, but don't quote me on that.
Took me a second to wrap my mind around that, but yeah, that is weird.
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Old 31st December 2018, 09:00 AM   #59
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Originally Posted by Myriad View Post
Polar bears, even if they're starving, don't eat penguin eggs.
In fact, of all attempts to feed penguin eggs to a polar bear, none has been successful.
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Old 31st December 2018, 09:03 AM   #60
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
In fact, of all attempts to feed penguin eggs to a polar bear, none has been successful.
So did the bears spit out the egg after nomming the arm?
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Old 31st December 2018, 09:08 AM   #61
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Originally Posted by Squeegee Beckenheim View Post
Oh, and if we count History as a science, this one always gets a "really?" from people who don't already know it - Oxford University was a fully-fledged university compete with halls of residence nearly 100 years before the origination of Aztec society.
The original Star Wars was in theaters when France used the guillotine for the last time.

Mammoths were still alive on one island in Northern Siberia when the Pyramids were being built

The Pyramids were as ancient to the Ancient Greeks as they Ancient Greeks are to us.

Tyrannosaur lived closer to us then it did to Stegosaurus.

The fax machine was invented before the modern doorknob.

We put men on the moon before it occurred to anyone to put wheels on luggage.

Warner Brothers Studio was founded a couple of months before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
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Old 31st December 2018, 09:28 AM   #62
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue View Post
The original Star Wars was in theaters when France used the guillotine for the last time.

Mammoths were still alive on one island in Northern Siberia when the Pyramids were being built

The Pyramids were as ancient to the Ancient Greeks as they Ancient Greeks are to us.

Tyrannosaur lived closer to us then it did to Stegosaurus.

The fax machine was invented before the modern doorknob.

We put men on the moon before it occurred to anyone to put wheels on luggage.

Warner Brothers Studio was founded a couple of months before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Also, 1985 is now further away from us than 1955 was from Marty McFly.
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Old 31st December 2018, 09:29 AM   #63
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Much of the water in your body has been previously peed by something. Or someone.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:01 AM   #64
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Fleas can jump as high as 38 times their body length, about three inches. And the acceleration is so intense that fleas have to withstand 100 Gs.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:03 AM   #65
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Originally Posted by GodMark2 View Post
Nope, cells simply divide: there is no 'replacement'. 'New ones' are just halves of old ones. The old ones were, themselves, just parts of older ones, all the way back...
At first I was also struck by your statement, thinking no he got it wrong, the amazing fact is that our DNA code represents a continuous line for the 3 billion years since the origin of DNA-based life on the planet. That is amazing enough and I've thought about it more than once: my DNA has been duplicated, mutated, rearranged, and altered dramatically in that time but what I have was copied from the DNA of my parents which was copied from the DNA of their parents which was copied....from the DNA of a shared ancestor with the chimps.. which was copied from a shared ancestor with all vertebrates... which was copied from the the DNA in original "first" organism.

But then I thought more about your post and I think you are right. All that copying of DNA took place in cells. So each of our cells originated from cells (including sperm and oocytes in sexual species) which originated from cells... all the way back. Many or most of the actual molecules in those cells may have been diluted out to zero during that time but the lineage of cell to cell to cell was absolutely continuous!

Just one twist: some of those cells may have been metabolically inactive spores. But biologically they were cells nonetheless.

Thanks! Neat idea! Everything now alive, including ourselves, are the unbroken children of children of children... from the very first life. We are the products of unbroken successful reproduction and selection at each step in that long trip.

So don't drive drunk this NYE: it took 3 billion years to create who you are and it would be very disappointing to the primordial ooze that first invented DNA if their invention, and their cells, were to come to an end in you for such a stupid reason as being killed in a car crash.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:15 AM   #66
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Originally Posted by calebprime View Post
Will Ferrell has been funny to some people some of the time.
Oh, FFS! Does everything here have to be black and white choose the the hill I must die on?! Could it be that Will Ferell is simply better when he's part of an ensemble instead of a headliner?!
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:22 AM   #67
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
The mass of an atom is very close to the mass of the protons + neutrons + electrons. The binding energy isn't that high compared to the masses of those particles, so while it's a measurable portion of the mass, it's certainly not 95% of it.
Quite so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclea...g_energy_curve
A proton has a mass on the order of 900 MeV, so a nucleon binding energy on the order of 9 MeV gives you only about 1% difference in mass.

Quote:
Actually, thinking about it the mass of, say, Helium is less than the mass of it's constituent particles, which is why you can get energy out of the fusion of hydrogen into helium.
That's the second fundamental mistake in that post: because you have to add energy to unbind them, the mass of separated constituents of a human would be larger, not smaller, than of a formed human.

Quote:
However, something like what he said is true, not of the atoms, but of the nucleons: if you were to disassemble the protons and neutrons (somehow?) into their constituent quarks, on the other hand, then you'd find that most of the mass was missing. Because the mass of a proton really is mostly in the form of the binding energy (the gluons I guess), and the quarks' mass makes up a small proportion of the total.
That's closer to it, but it's more complicated than just binding energy:
The bare mass of up quarks is so light, it cannot be straightforwardly calculated because relativistic effects have to be taken into account. Due to strong force mediated by gluons in the gluon field, the quarks move at roughly 99.995% of the speed of light, leading to Lorentz factor of roughly 100. As a result, the combined rest mass of quarks is barely 1% of proton or neutron mass.
This is further complicated by the fact that you cannot actually separate all the quarks, since they cannot exist on their own. Pull them apart hard enough, and you just end up generating new quarks so that the parts you pulled apart each still have at least 2 quarks.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:25 AM   #68
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Originally Posted by Brainache View Post
I don't think this is true. Cells die all the time and are replaced by new ones.

You might be thinking of the fact that every atom in our bodies was formed billions of years ago inside stars (one of my favourite facts).

Nope, cells die all the time and are replaced. They are replaced by another cell dividing in two. No cell is ever created from scratch, apart from the very first one. Ever since then they have been dividing until one became a sperm and one an egg and merged and started dividing etc. and became you.


Edit: Oops, so I read the rest of the thread, ninja'd so many times.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:27 AM   #69
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:28 AM   #70
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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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Old 31st December 2018, 10:32 AM   #71
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:33 AM   #72
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- Brontosaurus was a dinosaur. Then it wasn't. Now (last time I checked) it is again.
- The jury isn't all the way in yet, but there's some strong evidence that Torosaurus and Triceratops were the same animal.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:37 AM   #73
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue View Post
No here NASA is not good enough for me. They speak of a sizeable part (could not find the 1%) but if you cannot discern the differrence between connected and disconnected antenna that's not sizeable the way I use that word.

I really would need some quantitative data.

Look I don't discount the fact that some CMB is picked up, I just contest the amount.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:40 AM   #74
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Originally Posted by TheGnome View Post
No here NASA is not good enough for me. They speak of a sizeable part (could not find the 1%) but if you cannot discern the differrence between connected and disconnected antenna that's not sizeable the way I use that word.

I really would need some quantitative data.

Look I don't discount the fact that some CMB is picked up, I just contest the amount.
*Shrugs* Okay then don't believe it. I'm not gonna jump through hoops for you.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:42 AM   #75
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The pistol shrimp kills its prey by means of a shock wave caused by the clicking of its claw, the generation of which momentarily attains a temperature hotter than the surface of the Sun.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:49 AM   #76
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:55 AM   #77
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Originally Posted by cullennz View Post
Per size and ratio, gonorrhea is the strongest (known) creature on earth.
Gonorrhea grows well on chocolate agar.
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Old 31st December 2018, 10:58 AM   #78
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Koala fingerprints are practically indistinguishable from human ones.
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Old 31st December 2018, 11:04 AM   #79
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Originally Posted by TheGnome View Post
Would you have a link or something to support this? Just offhand I plain don't believe this.
I haven't tried to derive percentages, but here's one source:

https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r...2-S!!PDF-E.pdf

Page 6 shows a plot of noise from several different sources at different frequencies, including cosmic background.
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Old 31st December 2018, 11:05 AM   #80
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A neutron star is so dense and its gravity is so strong that if an object was dropped from one meter above the star’s surface, it would hit the surface at a speed of 7.2 million km per hour.
Also, a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about a billion tons.

Of course, it would be impossible to scoop up a teaspoon of neutron star or to suspend an object a meter above its surface before letting it go. Still, I believe the math works out. Regardless, neutron stars are cool, that's a fact.
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