The 'show why science is awesome' thread:

Can science save this endangered fish by growing it in a lab?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/can-scientists-build-a-blueprint-for-bluefin-tuna/2018/11/12/b39adc00-db91-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html

Interesting article about more than just lab-grown fish, but meats of various kinds. It’s all super expensive right now, but promising. With a breakthrough or two in the next few years, it could really take off.

Astrophysicists count all the starlight in the universe

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/29/astrophysicists-count-all-starlight-universe/

That’s a lot of photons!

For every atom, there are 40,000 photons. That’s so cool.

That’s pretty mindblowing.


XKCD, of course

Could you say the same about regular trains vs. bullet trains vs. hyperloop?

Designer proteins, on the way! Could do all kinds of good for people with various types of deficiencies. And bring us lots of new performance enhancers, of course.

That is the El Dorado of human medicine.

Kind of along those same lines:

Edit:

So what do you do when a satellite launches into the incorrect orbit due to a flaw in booster design?

Why you prove general relativity of course

Just a cool video all around. I like how Scott is doing more of these.

I really want this to be true and as ubiquitous as they claim.

These are the days of miracles and wonders…

As long as there’s no lasers in the jungle. I can’t abide the thought of lasers in the jungle somewhere.

Don’t cry baby, don’t cry.

Interesting. I wonder if it’s an angular momentum thing, where the upper band is just rotating too slowly, thus the first visible artifacts of the tornado show up near the ground and are spinning much quicker.

Well, there is certainly less friction at higher altitudes.

But stir your spoon in some coffee, and the spinning is stronger and tighter at the bottom where the head of the spoon is than at the top.

Is this awesome or terrifying?

Is this something in between Ant-Man tech and the opposite of Shrinky Dinks?

How interesting! I’m imagining incredible possibilities – but I’m also remembering back in school when I thought I was a genius when I thought of putting files in a .zip file, then .zipping that .zip file again, and so on, compressing data until you could fit the contents of a hard drive into a single 3.5" floppy. Turns out it didn’t work that way.

Like, there’s nothing this technique can do to get around the conservation of mass, right?