Lightning makes new isotopes

nature.com

70 points·pwg··7 comments

Does this impact carbon dating in anyways? Since it's an unaccounted source of radioactive carbon. Thanks.

Very unlikely, because the calibration used for carbon dating is acquired by comparing with artifacts of a known age, i.e. experimentally, and not from first principles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibration_of_radiocarbon_dat...

How does this help if multiple date ranges correspond to the same C14/C12 ratio?

Makes me think of the Electric Universe alt-theory! I wonder...

If only they would have simply written "gamma ray" instead of γ-ray, but I suppose there are the bandwidth savings to consider...

I see nothing wrong with using the γ-ray nomenclature, but writing gamma ray instead would surely make the text more readable IMO.

I think it's a valid criticism, not sure why the downvote rain happened. Too snarky, maybe?

Unless you really mean that they did this for the purpose of saving a few bytes, then I disagree with you.

Hacker News downvotes are to be ignored as pedantry at best. Imagine the level of discomfort inflicted by my comment, and that should correlate well with the amount of discomfort the HN frowny face is truly worth. Maybe it's taste is closest to something like licking a nine volt battery.

They are mostly unproductive, and express an opinion more akin to noise than anything else.

Don't try to predict when downvotes will occur. Only predict that aligning your comment perfectly with the general sentiment of HN's echochamber and the capricious views of some of its moderators, will likely result in a general trend of upvotes.

If you ardently pine for someone else's approval, conform to their every whim.

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