I imagine if the second gen can take down missiles this will be far more accurate than the other interceptor-type weapons systems the US has been trying to develop as a missiles shield.
Here’s a way that science is not so awesome. Or more accurately, why we need to really careful about what we believe in science journals, because their review methods may not be so awesome.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/07/22/predatory-journals-star-wars-sting
Accepted by four journals, despite a line saying “The majority of the text in the current paper was Rogeted from Wikipedia” in the paper itself.
The problem being highlighted in that blog post is the ‘predatory journals’. Science publication used to be strictly the realm of paper journals where the cost of publication was borne primarily by subscription fees (mostly paid by university libraries, but many journals also had a significant number of individual subscribers). A rebellion of sorts began in the 90s, with the confluence of certain publishers making an exorbitant amount of money by jacking up subscription prices (Elsevier) plus the internet - with a few visionary folks realizing that paper was no longer a necessary part of publication. They led a push for ‘open access’ publishing, with cost of keeping the enterprise running being borne by a charge paid by the authors, rather than the readers. The unintended consequence being that pretty much anyone who has ever published a scientific paper now gets 5-10 emails per week from online ‘journals’ that exist only to extract publication fees from authors. They talk big about peer review, but that’s just a cover story - they’ll take anything from anyone who is willing to pay them money. All it takes to be an ‘academic publisher’ in that sense is an email address and some imagination to dream up sciency-sounding journal names.
This is super cool.
Life that naturally thrives in pure acid. They are called polyextremephiles since they survive a triumverate of challenges. They’ve adapted to extreme acidity, very high temperatures, and high salinity all at the same time. In retrospect, it seems like life living in the liquid zones of Europa and Enceladus have fewer potential extremes to overcome than these critters.
I wasn’t sure if I should put this here, or in the Grimoire thread, in honor of Cleve. We share our lab space with the speaker (David Reich), and he’s both a great statistical thinker, as well as very interesting guy.
There are a million of these stories all the time but this one seems more promising since this tech is already in use in some places they’re just making it better suited for general purposes:
Also I thought we had a battery technology thread or something similar but hopefully this will do.
What could possibly go wrong with allowing these things out into the wild?
Somewhat relatedly, the financial press has been full of pieces over the last few days about this flying taxi startup getting a big investment from Tencent. It’s pretty cool tech, especially if the VTOL-to-horizontal aspect proves reliable in the long term, but some of the coverage has been absurdly breathless, talking about it reducing congestion in cities and competing on cost with ground travel. Just a simple back of the envelope calculation would show how ridiculous those claims are. They’re planning a five-seater vehicle. There are 5m passenger journeys each day on the London Underground alone, and road congestion is still abysmal. To have a material impact on traffic the sky would be blotted out by flying taxis. Assuming this gets regulatory clearance and the tech stands up, it will replace helicopters for executives. That’s it.
Well, if The Fifth Element taught me anything, it’s that the future looks exactly as you described.
MULTIPASS.
This year for our yard haunt we’ve been experimenting with silicone molds and rigid foam props.
Working with the foam is fascinating. I’d never really considered how rigid foam is made; now having played with it, it’s fun. It’s simple; two chemicals mixed 1:1 by volume, stirred vigorously, then poured into the mold. All done in a short time, as the mixture has a very short pot life before it starts to rise.
That’s the fun bit. It looks like cake batter rising in an oven. You can cap the mold with something that’s ventilated to provide some back pressure (and increase the density of the resulting foam), but you don’t always want to do that. That’s more for molds with some complex bits you want to force the foam into.
The props that come out are generally nicely detailed. The foam we got is self skinning, and quite dense compared to, say, styrofoam.
I’ll try to post some examples when we run our next prop. Halloween - fun and sciencey!
Today is the 60th anniversary of Crick’s lecture proposing the “Central Dogma” of biology:
Crick also went on in the early 60s to do most of the experiments that deciphered the “genetic code” - which DNA triplet codes for which amino acid.
But Watson’s an asshole. I’ve met him in person, can confirm.
Certainly not the only scientist who qualifies. William Shockley was a racist jerk.
Nobel Prize awarded for Physics:
The punniest Nobel ever.
Still i’ve been listening to grav wave stuff for the last couple of years. Kind of didn’t want it to actually have been true, but amazing stuff nonetheless. There are three interferometers up now, and these black hole merger events seem surprisingly common.
I’m curious, why? Was there a competing idea that you liked?