I’ve switched, but this really is my one major gripe. Good to see others see it as a priority too, but if it’s been a conversation for 4 years then I’m not optimistic

The conversion from protons to neutrons does not complete 100% so there are still some (trillion) protons left per “atom”

Strike Forced-Out Five (once the other 3 are cancelled)

Date her mom

Oddly, space is cold but spaceships tend to get too hot. Engines/electroncs/people give off heat inside the ship which gets trapped. You move heat by conduction, convection, or radiation, but because outside is a vacuum you cant disapate heat with the first 2 and are limited to the least effective radiation so the heat builds up

Typical physicist, ignoring enthalpy of phase changes. Starting from 1C defrosted makes a huge difference from 0C as the melting takes up a ton more energy/slaps. Their underslapped chicken would give you salmonella

Leek spin https://youtu.be/GCO62VNm67k

Which is actually the Finnish song “Ievan polkka” and not just scatting/jibberish as I always naively used to think

Not always. I teach a module where my lectures are fully coursework assessed and my god, a lot of the submissions are clearly AI. It’s super hard to prove though and I just mark the same as any other, but half-halluvinated school-grade garbage scores pretty damn low.

(edit: this is because we are trained on how to write questions AI struggles with. It makes writing exams harder, but it is possible. AI is terrible at chemistry. My personal favourite being when Google AI told me the melting point of pyrrole was about -2000C, so colder than absolute zero)

A few options me and my partner have enjoyed:

Bunhouse - a non-management-heavy farming simulator but you are bunnies growing plants. Cute as hell. There is a sequel where you run a bakery too but we haven’t got round to that just yet.

Unrailed - might fall into the overcooked catagory, but when it gets hard and goes wrong it tends to be a looming inevitablity, not a frantic panic

Nidhogg - a 1v1 fighter, but is quick fire frantic sword fights you can button bash through which is wildly entertaining in 5 min bursts.

Sorry, should have clarified - I was speaking on the part of many academics. In my department, most people (faculty) have abandoned Twitter and a fair few have started on bluesky although more just don’t use the format in any context anymore. I only know of one who uses Mastadoon.

But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don’t need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn’t (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer

Currently, garbage. They used it to reinforce a polymer to go from a strength of 50 MPa to 70 MPa. Kevlar is 10x stronger, commercially scaled, and cheap

You can’t say that. It should be “one fewer CEO”

It’s literally in the paper! "The nomenclature varies with the diameter of the fibers (and region), including ∼2 mm spaghetti (small string), ∼1.75 mm vermicellini (little worms), and ∼900 μm capellini (little hairs). The narrowest diameter mass-produced pasta is ∼800 μm capelli d’angello (angel hair), although thinner pasta lunga is produced by hand exclusively in the town of Nuoro, Sardinia: su filindeu (threads of God), which is estimated to have half the diameter of capelli d’angello and is, to the authors’ knowledge, the thinnest pasta created by hand to date "

Orville (with S4 pseudo confirmed!)

There’s lots of people who are pointing out that 1000x better might be misleading, which is certainly true here, but let me be a little more exact and explain things briefly (nb I’m a prof of Materials chemistry and am involved in PV research, although it’s not my main focus). Firstly, this research does not give the efficiency which is usually the headline number*. Mainly because most of their measurement aren’t using sunlight but a laser. Here they see it does interact with light to give electricity and they show the response is 1000x higher current for their new layered materials versus the unlayered type. However, as others have pointed 1000x a low number isn’t great. The highest measured current** is 0.5 mA/cm2 although they actually do proper sunlight measurements (under 1.5 suns, which is a common way to measure this) and get 0.035 mA/cm2. This is something we can compare to commercial solar cells and it’s almost exactly 100x lower than a commercial silicon solar cell (35 mA/cm2).

Obviously there’s a lot more detail and nuance here I’m skipping over but (i) don’t expect this to change the world in the near future and (ii) its a new material approach which is cool scientifically and while the uninformed media is hyping it, the scientists in the paper were perfectly reasonable.

If you have any other questions, I’ll try to reply ASAP.

*RE efficiencies normal silicon ones are normally around 15%, good perovskite next-gem ones are a bit above 20%, and there’s a hard physical limit of 33% for a perfect single solar cell

**They use uA/cm2 because their numbers are low. I’ve converted to the more common mA/cm2. These data are in Fig 3c and Fig3d. I’d recommend you have a look yourself as there’s no paywall. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4206

Archived version: https://archive.ph/20240809233608/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/truth-about-trumps-press-conference/679425/

The same people who presumably fill balloons with helum, want to cut down on sodum in their diet, prevent Iran from refining uranum, power their phones with lithum batteries, and enjoy singing David Guetta’s house classic Titanum

If the petition hits it target, the politicians are forced to discuss it which would include agreeing workable language. It would not automatically become the law with the proposed language.

I’m call BS. Titanium isn’t really very strong (about the same as copper when pure, while specialist Ti alloys are about halfway between aluminium and generic steel). People use titanium when they want something metal which is pretty strong but very lightweight. As an aside, it has pretty meh ductility for a metal and would make a poor bulletproof material, so David Guetta got that wrong too