Valgrim

An AFM is completely useless to identify the chemical elements, protein or crystalline structure inside a sample.

The issue is the size of some of these analysers. For instance, a synchrotron, which is required to non-destructively generate nanometer-scale 3d images of the samples are 3-4 times the size of a football stadium

I bought an old Nissan Leaf last year. They're actually cheaper than gas cars of the same year. This summer, the weather was nice, I was remote working and I decided to get into a park under a canopy on a picnic table. I took a 50ft electric table and plugged my laptop on an inverter in my car.

I realized that my old electric car battery actually has a LOT of electricity in it. My laptop was connected for 9 hours and it used 1% of my car battery. Maybe less. I saw that there is a way to connect my car to my house electric power and use it to run the house heat pump for around 100 hours or more.

Anyway its now obvious to me that electric cars and home solar are a very good combination.

I'm gonna be the annoying guy who points out the obvious thats being repeated again and again for the last 50 years...

For transport, trains! Trains of different sizes, shapes and designs, solve most of the transport issues. The fact that western countries are behind on this doesnt mean it's too late to start.

For heat, better insulation and heat pumps do wonders!

For feedstock maybe feeding animals is simply bot the way we should move forward.

And I say all this as a person who drives a gas car 70 miles every day, lives in an old house with bad insulation and eat meat several times a week

Not only that, but there are quite a few scientifically sound concepts that escape the tyranny of the rocket equation. Pre-seeded trajectories, particle beam propulsion, sails etc. Breaking the wall of light might not be possible but beating the current rockets by orders of magnitudes is enough for interstellar travel. And that is only an engineering problem.

My personal favorite these days is innumerable 'smart' pellets, bacteria sized, steering themselves using albedo-changing surfaces toward the ship's magnetic sail to transfer their momentum, allowing for constant acceleration.

There have been exactly 0 known deadly attacks from wild orcas in history.

Also my recommendation: -Make the card vertical instead of horizontal (phones are held vertically) -Add a +/- bottom on each end of the slider for fine tuning the ppi by 0.1 increment or lower, -Allow to manually change the value in the field

Molybdenum and tungsten both have melting point much higher than silicon, Maybe these circuits could be a good candidate for Venus rovers?

A few years ago a popular idea was that our universe existed as an hologram on the surface of a black hole.

Recently I saw also a theory that black hole might not, in fact, exist as we thought, and may be instead something called 'gravastars', where large stars do not collapse in an infinite point but instead the mass reaches a maximum density and hardness and become sorts of empty bubbles.

Now this. It's not exactly a new idea, I remember reading about black hole cosmology 10 years ago.

Sooo... My uneducated, pop-sci fueled imagination now sees the universe as a mathematical function of a fractal looking like a shell with patterns on it, and those patterns interact or 'fold' in a way where the patterns themselves can be thought of as shells with patterns on them, and each shell creates something that, from the inside, looks like a new dimension of space or time, and what we think of as black holes are the next fold. Does that make sense?

There's an interesting implication to this. We assume that evolution happens when random mutations (similar to random bit flips, removal or injection?) occur and when the random result has an advantage, the mutation tends to remain in the gene pool.

Yet at the same time the result of this random code is extremely compressed, to the point we compare it to procedural generative code.

Not sure what we can do with this but it certainly seems like we can once again get inspired by nature on this one.

ZBLAN is such a material, a type of glass much more transparent than silica glass and could be used for fiber optics. It has been tested on the ISS.

A similar fictional material is also at the center of the plot of the novel Artemis by Andy Weir.

I think the parent comment exposes the obvious flaw of using plasma to drill: Drilling with diamond bits uses fluid, which is uncompressible. Drilling with plasma uses gas, which is compressible. No matter how thick the obsidian layer get, there is a critical pressure differential between outside and inside and it will crack and collapse.

You could probably use significantly less coolant if you're using heat pipes. The coolant is mainly gaseous and only a small mass remains liquid during the cycle

Are there any battery that are non toxic if lighted on fire?

Cult member here.

I started listening to audiobooks (not this one) about 5 years ago, after a job transfer that meant driving 2 hours a day, in slow traffic, with little attention needed (due to a tunnel repair that will likely take decades).

Keep in mind that I was some time ago an avid reader, capable of devouring an entire book in a single night. But for a decade or so I found myself feeling eye fatigue while reading and I just stopped reading books altogether.

Driving and listening to audiobooks just works for my brain, in a way that radio's unoriginal music or taking hosts or podcast do not. Without listening to audiobooks, driving is boring, frustrating, tiring. When I listen to an audiobook, I become attentive, focused, wide awake, and most importantly it transforms a bad part of my day into a part of the day I genuinely enjoy.

As long as the book is engaging and narrator is good.

Now my first exploration into the format was 'The Expanse' series, then 'The Siege' trilogy, and maybe a dozen more, including non-fiction like 'Longitude'.

English is not my first language and I found that while original french audiobooks can be great (I really enjoyed 'La Bête' trilogy by David Goudreault) I found that translation are generally very bad for audiobooks.

Eventually I had the pleasure of listening The Bobiverse Series, engaged on the subreddit and saw a recommendation for DCC. Then another and another.

The premise seemed so ridiculous. The litrpg 'genre' appeared horrifyingly bad and off-putting. And yet I kept seeing it over and over again, so I tried the first book.

Now it won't be a surprise to any seasoned reader that it's not the genre, the premise or the author that makes a good book. It's a lot more personal, in the genuine connection with the soul the story can generate, through humor and horror, hope and fear, love and hate, curiosity and ehat I like to call 'brain tickling'. And, for me at least, Matt has done this at a level I've never felt before, with a guy in boxers and a talking cat, no less.

It feels less like a word prediction algorithm and more like a world model compression algorithm. Maybe we tried to create one and accidentaly created the other?

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

Not sure what functionality is not covered by current cables. Both my laptop and phone, which are several years old, use the usb-C connector for power, data, video, audio, and combined with a hub can connect to any usb peripheral out there.

Sure, the weird triple-split usb-c connector that came with my son's cheap walkie-talkies from Amazon doesn't do all that. But I don't expect it to, and it will at least charge my phone if I plug it, and that's the primary usage I want for this cable.

I learned to drive with a manual transmission so I'd feel comfortable driving any car in Europe, where manual transmissions are far more common. The transition was stressful but after a few hours it became easier and after a few days, it became second nature—just as easy as driving an automatic.

Today, my own car has a manual transmission, which I prefer for the added control. It lets me use different levels of engine braking on downhill stretches (very useful depending on where you live) and manage my speed more precisely in heavy traffic.

I like to refer to this kind of article when a kid has trouble understanding why they need to provide sources in their homework. Sometimes it's difficult for them to understand that this kind of assertation, that people use constantly in a conversational context, just sounds like a poorly formulated opinion when it's written down.

I'm curious about the Aldrin Cycler analysis. Isn't the whole point of the "castle" to house travelers and life support system in a larger habitable space during the long travel, independently of the cargo required for mars that's carried on a different, cheaper trajectory?

Artemis by Andy Weir dwells a lot on this kind of infrastructure, but I never could understand the orbital mechanics described in the book.

I don't think this result reflects all antibiotic treatments:

"RESULTS Oral antibiotic treatment disrupts the colonic mucus barrier"

Intraveinous administration may or may not cause the same effect, or a similar effect. Maybe oral antibiotics is generally a bad idea because it disrupts the microbiome, but in other forms it's generally fine.

Heat released by global human energy consumption, every source combined, is insignificant compared by heat received from the sun. (quick calculation 17.7TW / 173PW= 0.01026%). Global warming is caused by greenhouse gases trapping radiation, not by direct heat emissions

Keep in mind that there was nothing indicating that the sun and the stars were of the same nature, or that they were so far away. When you think about it, all stars appear equally distant to the naked eye, so the idea that stars were fiery stones dispersed on a vast celestial sphere was absolutely plausible. This solid, physical sphere was the thing rotating.

Also people had little understanding of the scale of things. There is nothing indicating that the moon is smaller than earth or that the sun is much, much bigger than earth, and both appear equally large in the sky...

Here's what I understand of this, correct me if I'm wrong.

If 1 kg of matter and 1 kg of antimatter annihilate each other, their entire mass is converted into photons, which are massless. If said photons are entirely absorbed by a black hole, the mass of the black hole will increase by 2 kg, and so will the gravitational pull of the black hole.

In that case, wouldn't it be safe to assume that photons, even if they're massless, create a gravitational field equivalent to their energy level?

If your camera app has a manual setting, set a 5 second timer and a 30 seconds exposure, then put it on the floor, face down and camera up.

If you want to angle it in a specific direction, a small plastic bag with sand, earth or rice in it will provide a polyvalent, portable and stable support.

The simplest capture device you need, you probably own already. A long manual exposure of around 30 seconds will give out magnificent pictures even with the most potato of cameras

Sorry,I'm confused. Aren't podcasts audio by definition?

Unless your audience is going to be mainly on a video platform (and even then, the following advice will apply) you should focus your budget on audio equipment, and possibly build a recording booth.

About point 2: in my neighborhood there's half a dozen kids, all aged 5-8, all communicating constantly during weekends using cheap, loud FRS walkie talkies some parent bought in a 10-pack off Amazon.

My point being that even without internet, or even without knowing how to type and barely able to read, social networks just pop into existence.