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.