But just wanted to point out that last night it successfully alerted me to the passing overhead of the international space station. Correct time, direction, inclination, and duration.
My daughter was pretty impressed with the rising star in the sky.
And again just now. It's just really neat knowing there are humans up there.
The ISS is pretty cool to see going overhead. It can get surprisingly bright!
Not to mention fast. That thing books.
7.67 kilometers per second
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Basically they want to try and 'fake it' this time, by altering an existing elephant embryo to trigger Mammoth-like traits in development.
I saw about that earlier. I'm in two minds about it. My best friend and I have discussed the scenario of bringing mammoths back for a long time, since I have an interest in science and he has a degree in it. I'd be happy with stuff bringing back animals we wiped out, like the passenger pigeon, great auk or dodo, but I'm worried about doing the same with mammoths. The gap between their extinction and now is much longer, they were adapted to a very particular environment and died out when that environment's climate changed, and bringing them back to the modern world just seems to be inviting the whole thing to happen a second time.
My friend on the other hand thinks "OMG FLUFFY ELEPHANT PLEASE CAN WE KEEP ONE I'LL CALL HIM TINY!"
He was the one who gave me the heads up on the article earlier today. I think he's currently drawing up plans for a very, very large kennel.
+5
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Gennenalyse RuebenThe Prettiest Boy is Ridiculously PrettyRegistered Userregular
I like the idea of recreating extinct species by modifying existing ones mostly because it's the only way we can have actual dinosaurs again.
Even if they are only liable to be chickens with teeth.
I like the idea of recreating extinct species by modifying existing ones mostly because it's the only way we can have actual dinosaurs again.
Even if they are only liable to be chickens with teeth.
...Dinosaurs honestly seem like they would be kind of easy?
I mean, we know which enzyme or whatever needs to be activated to trigger teeth growth in modern birds.
Take a Crimson Macaw, activate that enzyme... you've got basically a theropod dinosaur. I mean it kind of already is one anyway, but the teeth will actually enable it to fucking kill you and rip your guts out instead of merely wishing it could do that.
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
I think that's gonna depend on what you mean by empty space.
Like you can't push them together? Because I can hand you two magnets that you won't be able to push together. Does this mean that there isn't empty space between them?
Then we start talking about why you think various repulsive forces are to be treated differently from each other....
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
Neutrons pass through most matter easily because they don't have an electric charge, and absent that they're very unlikely to actually hit the nucleus.
Remember back on pages 2 and 3 when I was talking about how incredibly good BBC's nature documentaries are? They did it again.
'Spy in the Wild' brought a team of scientists and engineers together to create realistic animatronics of wild animals, capable of mimicking animal behaviour, with cameras installed to allow them to record animals at their most relaxed in their most intimate surroundings.
"Spy Creatures" created and accepted by wild animals include a bush baby (which filmed a family of chimpanzees, including one with a pet wildcat) an orangutan, baby monkeys of various species, an egret (which followed an elephant herd) a turtle (which followed a pod of dolphins and filmed them getting high on puffer fish) a meerkat, a wolf cub and two adele penguins. There was also a boulder cam, many rock cams, some pebble cams, some egg cams, and a dung cam.
If you have ever wanted to see a lifelike robotic egret perched on top of a robotic pile of elephant dung (carefully made to look and smell like the real thing) and riding it across vast grasslands to film migrating elephants, this is the show for you.
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
Neutrons pass through most matter easily because they don't have an electric charge, and absent that they're very unlikely to actually hit the nucleus.
I think that's gonna depend on what you mean by empty space.
Like you can't push them together? Because I can hand you two magnets that you won't be able to push together. Does this mean that there isn't empty space between them?
Then we start talking about why you think various repulsive forces are to be treated differently from each other....
...
*nods stupidly*
*accepts simplified answer because real science is hard*
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
Neutrons pass through most matter easily because they don't have an electric charge, and absent that they're very unlikely to actually hit the nucleus.
A hydrogen atom is about 99.9999999999996% empty space. Put another way, if a hydrogen atom were the size of the earth, the proton at its center would be about 200 meters (600 feet) across. While I wouldn't want something that big landing on my head, it's tiny compared to the size of the earth.
This is also why neutron stars are so ridiculous - there's almost no 'empty space' in them.
Yeah. The amount of empty space in an atom really stands out when you think of a neutron star where that space is compacted. Minimum mass for a neutron star is 1.4 suns - a good bit more than all the mass in the solar system. Diameter is 20km. That isn't a typo. A long distance runner could run the circumference in a few hours were he or she not crushed to death. Estimates of the actual density seems to vary somewhat, but it looks from online sources that a teaspoon would weigh 10 to 100 million tons. The three gorges dam in china, by comparison, weighs about 34 million tons. If you took that teaspoon to earth, the explosive decompression of that single teaspoon from no longer being under pressure from gravity would carry enough kinetic energy to wipe out all or most life on earth, being over 1000 times bigger than the dinosaur extinction event.
Oh, also - I always mean to ask this question but forget:
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
Quite a lot more than 99% empty
when you look close enough there is no "empty" space, really. But on the scale of an atom I think the everyday definition of "empty" does indeed apply. All of the constitute parts are not localized in space. There is a probability distribution which gives the odds that something would interact with an electron or other particle at a given position. But you can get a pretty darn accurate idea of the "size" of an atom by just asking where do the odds of encountering an given bit of it get to some arbitrarily small number.
It's important to remember that it's not the case that particles "actually" exist at a single location and wizz around with the probability meaning something like the odds that the electron really happened to be at a given spot. They really do get de-localized and the closest thing that can be said in plain english is that they exist spread out over an area all at the same time. Electrons are not little balls orbiting a nucleus.
The nucleus of an atom is a few femtometres across (it gets bigger with the cube root of the number of protons and neutrons). The probability distribution for the positions of the stuff in the nucleus is very tightly squished together. By comparison the radius where electron for a hydrogen atom is most likely to be interacted with is 53,000 femtometres. In larger atoms the nucleus only gets a little bit larger but the outer, higher energy, electrons can get quite a lot further away.
So the nucleus of an atom is a tiny, compact thing on the order of a few units big (though even the nucleus is mostly "empty" with its own little world of quarks and gluons and comparatively vast amounts of vacuum). And the electrons are most likely to be interacted with 53,000 or more units away.
Even if you assume the nucleus is "solid" that means a hydrogen atom is ~4.1 parts "solid" per ~623000000000000 parts vacuum (I might have messed up the number of zeros there but its about right)
Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
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JacobyOHHHHH IT’S A SNAKECreature - SnakeRegistered Userregular
Atoms are empty in that, outside of the nucleus, there's very little mass there. (The electrons are there, but they're tiny.)
However, that doesn't mean nothing is happening there. The charges on the electrons and protons are affecting each other, with electrons repelling each other and protons attracting the electrons.
This means that I f you put something charged in the middle of an atom, it would be pushed by the combined forces of all those charges. If you tried to shrink an atom to remove that empty space, the rearrangement of the electrons would produce a force to counteract that.
On top of that, when you touch something, there's still empty space between your atoms and its atoms. The electrons on the outside of the atoms repel each other. In a sense, the fields touch, even if the atoms don't. (Like 2 magnets!)
GameCenter: ROldford
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
I'm waiting for when SpaceX are doing this often enough that they do at least 1 launch where they queue up a remix of "Driving with the Top Down" to it.
edit: weather looking shit. might clear in time for launch, might not.
edit 2: expected to clear ~20 mins before launch window.
evilbob on
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
Overcast and a few small rain showers moving through, but it looks like they are going for it anyways. I'd like to see one of these suckers launch in person some day. Or a Falcon Heavy, that would really be something.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Any definite word on when SpaceX will finally attempt to relaunch one of the pre-used rockets? It seems like they've been saying "soon" for nearly half a year.
Also, probably a dumb question, but is there a reason other than the expense for why SpaceX can't just relaunch one of the rockets with a dummy payload to prove it can work?
Any definite word on when SpaceX will finally attempt to relaunch one of the pre-used rockets? It seems like they've been saying "soon" for nearly half a year.
Also, probably a dumb question, but is there a reason other than the expense for why SpaceX can't just relaunch one of the rockets with a dummy payload to prove it can work?
As the proof of concept for reusable rockets, they understandably want to be as certain as possible that the first one goes off without a hitch.
Also they're creating an entirely new procedure for cleaning/repairing/reassembling tech that gets put through extreme conditions. That takes a while.
Any definite word on when SpaceX will finally attempt to relaunch one of the pre-used rockets? It seems like they've been saying "soon" for nearly half a year.
Also, probably a dumb question, but is there a reason other than the expense for why SpaceX can't just relaunch one of the rockets with a dummy payload to prove it can work?
Best way to prove that you can do it is to do it, do it often, and do it well. Dummy payload just proves you can get the weight into space, doing it for real means you can do the whole thing.
Any definite word on when SpaceX will finally attempt to relaunch one of the pre-used rockets? It seems like they've been saying "soon" for nearly half a year.
Also, probably a dumb question, but is there a reason other than the expense for why SpaceX can't just relaunch one of the rockets with a dummy payload to prove it can work?
Best way to prove that you can do it is to do it, do it often, and do it well. Dummy payload just proves you can get the weight into space, doing it for real means you can do the whole thing.
Doing it for real also involves convincing people to trust you with 6-8 figures worth of sensitive electronics.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Part of the science payload includes an MRSA accelerated evolution study. Hopefully that doesn't escape it's containment.
SpaceX is preparing to launch a lethal, antibiotic-resistant superbug into orbit...to live its days in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station. The idea is not to weaponize space with MRSA -- a bacterium that kills more Americans every year than HIV/AIDS, Parkinson's disease, emphysema, and homicide combined -- but to send its mutation rates into hyperdrive, allowing scientists to see the pathogen's next moves well before they appear on Earth. The NASA-funded study will see SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch colonies of MRSA into space, to be cultivated in the US National Laboratory on the International Space Station.
"We will leverage the microgravity environment on the ISS to accelerate the Precision Medicine revolution here on Earth," lead researcher Anita Goel, CEO of biotech company Nanobiosym, told Yahoo News... "Our ability to anticipate drug-resistant mutations with Gene-RADAR will lead to next generation antibiotics that are more precisely tailored to stop the spread of the world's most dangerous pathogens," says Goel.
The experiment is hosted in four BioCells Habitats, and makes use of BioServe’s Space Automated Bioproduct Lab (SABL) to culture the bacteria at 37°C.
Part of me can't help but think of the Infested Terrans from Starcraft.
Any definite word on when SpaceX will finally attempt to relaunch one of the pre-used rockets? It seems like they've been saying "soon" for nearly half a year.
Also, probably a dumb question, but is there a reason other than the expense for why SpaceX can't just relaunch one of the rockets with a dummy payload to prove it can work?
Attenborough is following up Planet Earth 2 with Blue Planet 2!
I CANNOT recommend Blue Planet highly enough. The deep ocean episode alone is one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen, not least because they discovered some species that were entirely new to science during the dives!
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TraceGNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered Userregular
NASA will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 22, to present new findings on planets that orbit stars other than our sun, known as exoplanets. The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.
Details of these findings are embargoed by the journal Nature until 1 p.m.
The VIR instrument was able to detect and map the locations of this material because of its special signature in near-infrared light.
The organic materials on Ceres are mainly located in an area covering approximately 400 square miles (about 1,000 square kilometers). The signature of organics is very clear on the floor of Ernutet Crater, on its southern rim and in an area just outside the crater to the southwest. Another large area with well-defined signatures is found across the northwest part of the crater rim and ejecta. There are other smaller organic-rich areas several miles (kilometers) west and east of the crater. Organics also were found in a very small area in Inamahari Crater, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from Ernutet.
The organics discovery adds to Ceres' attributes associated with ingredients and conditions for life in the distant past. Previous studies have found hydrated minerals, carbonates, water ice, and ammoniated clays that must have been altered by water. Salts and sodium carbonate, such as those found in the bright areas of Occator Crater, are also thought to have been carried to the surface by liquid.
“This discovery adds to our understanding of the possible origins of water and organics on Earth,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
edit: oh, this must be what the video up above was about. Well, it looked new to me!
Posts
And again just now. It's just really neat knowing there are humans up there.
7.67 kilometers per second
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Complex chemistry on Ceres, with a lovely Italian accent.
Behold! Fresh cabbage growing on the ISS! The link has further details on space farming.
Basically they want to try and 'fake it' this time, by altering an existing elephant embryo to trigger Mammoth-like traits in development.
I saw about that earlier. I'm in two minds about it. My best friend and I have discussed the scenario of bringing mammoths back for a long time, since I have an interest in science and he has a degree in it. I'd be happy with stuff bringing back animals we wiped out, like the passenger pigeon, great auk or dodo, but I'm worried about doing the same with mammoths. The gap between their extinction and now is much longer, they were adapted to a very particular environment and died out when that environment's climate changed, and bringing them back to the modern world just seems to be inviting the whole thing to happen a second time.
My friend on the other hand thinks "OMG FLUFFY ELEPHANT PLEASE CAN WE KEEP ONE I'LL CALL HIM TINY!"
He was the one who gave me the heads up on the article earlier today. I think he's currently drawing up plans for a very, very large kennel.
Even if they are only liable to be chickens with teeth.
...Dinosaurs honestly seem like they would be kind of easy?
I mean, we know which enzyme or whatever needs to be activated to trigger teeth growth in modern birds.
Take a Crimson Macaw, activate that enzyme... you've got basically a theropod dinosaur. I mean it kind of already is one anyway, but the teeth will actually enable it to fucking kill you and rip your guts out instead of merely wishing it could do that.
When people say atoms are 99% empty space or whatever... is that actually accurate? Or is that just another pop-science thing that is basically an approximation of a much more complex truth that is truncated for ease of consumption?
I think that's gonna depend on what you mean by empty space.
Like you can't push them together? Because I can hand you two magnets that you won't be able to push together. Does this mean that there isn't empty space between them?
Then we start talking about why you think various repulsive forces are to be treated differently from each other....
Neutrons pass through most matter easily because they don't have an electric charge, and absent that they're very unlikely to actually hit the nucleus.
'Spy in the Wild' brought a team of scientists and engineers together to create realistic animatronics of wild animals, capable of mimicking animal behaviour, with cameras installed to allow them to record animals at their most relaxed in their most intimate surroundings.
The results are extraordinary.
"Spy Creatures" created and accepted by wild animals include a bush baby (which filmed a family of chimpanzees, including one with a pet wildcat) an orangutan, baby monkeys of various species, an egret (which followed an elephant herd) a turtle (which followed a pod of dolphins and filmed them getting high on puffer fish) a meerkat, a wolf cub and two adele penguins. There was also a boulder cam, many rock cams, some pebble cams, some egg cams, and a dung cam.
If you have ever wanted to see a lifelike robotic egret perched on top of a robotic pile of elephant dung (carefully made to look and smell like the real thing) and riding it across vast grasslands to film migrating elephants, this is the show for you.
Atoms are 100% empty except for field effects.
...
*nods stupidly*
*accepts simplified answer because real science is hard*
http://education.jlab.org/qa/how-much-of-an-atom-is-empty-space.html
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I mean, yeah. Have you seen the movies? It seems honestly harder to keep dinosaurs from happening.
Yeah. The amount of empty space in an atom really stands out when you think of a neutron star where that space is compacted. Minimum mass for a neutron star is 1.4 suns - a good bit more than all the mass in the solar system. Diameter is 20km. That isn't a typo. A long distance runner could run the circumference in a few hours were he or she not crushed to death. Estimates of the actual density seems to vary somewhat, but it looks from online sources that a teaspoon would weigh 10 to 100 million tons. The three gorges dam in china, by comparison, weighs about 34 million tons. If you took that teaspoon to earth, the explosive decompression of that single teaspoon from no longer being under pressure from gravity would carry enough kinetic energy to wipe out all or most life on earth, being over 1000 times bigger than the dinosaur extinction event.
Quite a lot more than 99% empty
when you look close enough there is no "empty" space, really. But on the scale of an atom I think the everyday definition of "empty" does indeed apply. All of the constitute parts are not localized in space. There is a probability distribution which gives the odds that something would interact with an electron or other particle at a given position. But you can get a pretty darn accurate idea of the "size" of an atom by just asking where do the odds of encountering an given bit of it get to some arbitrarily small number.
It's important to remember that it's not the case that particles "actually" exist at a single location and wizz around with the probability meaning something like the odds that the electron really happened to be at a given spot. They really do get de-localized and the closest thing that can be said in plain english is that they exist spread out over an area all at the same time. Electrons are not little balls orbiting a nucleus.
The nucleus of an atom is a few femtometres across (it gets bigger with the cube root of the number of protons and neutrons). The probability distribution for the positions of the stuff in the nucleus is very tightly squished together. By comparison the radius where electron for a hydrogen atom is most likely to be interacted with is 53,000 femtometres. In larger atoms the nucleus only gets a little bit larger but the outer, higher energy, electrons can get quite a lot further away.
So the nucleus of an atom is a tiny, compact thing on the order of a few units big (though even the nucleus is mostly "empty" with its own little world of quarks and gluons and comparatively vast amounts of vacuum). And the electrons are most likely to be interacted with 53,000 or more units away.
Even if you assume the nucleus is "solid" that means a hydrogen atom is ~4.1 parts "solid" per ~623000000000000 parts vacuum (I might have messed up the number of zeros there but its about right)
However, that doesn't mean nothing is happening there. The charges on the electrons and protons are affecting each other, with electrons repelling each other and protons attracting the electrons.
This means that I f you put something charged in the middle of an atom, it would be pushed by the combined forces of all those charges. If you tried to shrink an atom to remove that empty space, the rearrangement of the electrons would produce a force to counteract that.
On top of that, when you touch something, there's still empty space between your atoms and its atoms. The electrons on the outside of the atoms repel each other. In a sense, the fields touch, even if the atoms don't. (Like 2 magnets!)
Switch: nin.codes/roldford
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Spacex hosted stream:
Spacex technical stream:
Nasa tv will also be covering the launch.
Hosted:
Technical:
NASA tv:
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/#public
edit: weather looking shit. might clear in time for launch, might not.
edit 2: expected to clear ~20 mins before launch window.
Also, probably a dumb question, but is there a reason other than the expense for why SpaceX can't just relaunch one of the rockets with a dummy payload to prove it can work?
As the proof of concept for reusable rockets, they understandably want to be as certain as possible that the first one goes off without a hitch.
Also they're creating an entirely new procedure for cleaning/repairing/reassembling tech that gets put through extreme conditions. That takes a while.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Best way to prove that you can do it is to do it, do it often, and do it well. Dummy payload just proves you can get the weight into space, doing it for real means you can do the whole thing.
Doing it for real also involves convincing people to trust you with 6-8 figures worth of sensitive electronics.
Part of the science payload includes an MRSA accelerated evolution study. Hopefully that doesn't escape it's containment. Part of me can't help but think of the Infested Terrans from Starcraft.
SES-10 launch currently scheduled for next month.
I CANNOT recommend Blue Planet highly enough. The deep ocean episode alone is one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen, not least because they discovered some species that were entirely new to science during the dives!
*vibrates*
edit: oh, this must be what the video up above was about. Well, it looked new to me!
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious