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It is expensive and it doesn't need to be there, but the reason its at the south pole is that the US has money for SOMETHING at the south pole. They want to maintain a presence at the south pole for international relations reasons. To be consistent with insternational treaties they need to do science there.

So, the US/NSF is like "we have a bunch of money to do science, but it has to be at the south pole". People like Halzen who had a crazy idea go to NSF and say how can I get a bunch of money to do this. NSF says, we don't have that kind of money in our physics budget, but if you were to do it at the southpole we could fund it.

probably what you mean, but to be clear there was an error in manufacturing the mirror. There was a calibration piece that was slightly larger then the design called for.

weird fact. there's no refineries in florida. All the gasoline in south florida comes in via ship/barge.

The rumor is Gemini 3.5 pro will be released next week.

It had previously been announced (at Google I/O) to be released in June, but it got pushed back. Why? Rumors range from they are having trouble to they scrapped an old framework to pursue a new one and the new model will surpass Fable 5 and be cheaper.

It's not as great as you might think, despite all the stories you see like this one. That's because most of the stories are in cells (this one) or mice.

The big success story, about 20 years old now, is testicular cancer. You can have metastatic testicular cancer with tumors all over your body (like Lance Armstrong had) and they can cure it. They use platinum based chemotherapy and it's not really well understood why it works for testicular cancer, but not others.

The story with childhood leukemias is similar. They figured out how to combine a bunch of chemotherapy to get the cure rate up pretty high. Leukemia in a child used to be (1990s) 90% fatal, it's like 10% now.

Besides those, most of the advances in the past few decades come from early detection/ surgery or just prevention (stop smoking).

There is some hope though. When people first started studying cancers at the molecular level, one of the first things they noticed was how often a gene called Ras was mutated in different cancers. It turns out that designing a drug for Ras was really hard, but it finally got done, it's called daraxonrasib. They just released phase III human trials with this drug in pancreatic cancer a week or two ago and it destroyed the standard of care (Chemotherapy), but that is saying people who were dying in 1-2 months were still alive after 5-6 months.

The former senator Ben Sasse was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer last December. Historically, that's like 5% survival rate for 5 years. He is on daraxonrasib. We will see how it works out.

It's not a SQUID. There is new technology (quantum magnetometry) that measures slight shifts in molecular energy levels inside defects in synthetic diamonds. One of the google/alphabet spinouts from their quantum computing research is commercializing the technology (SandboxAQ).

The have a non contact MCG, like a EKG, but no electrical contacts. They can definitely "see" the heart beating from a few feet away.

SandboxAQ is also developing a navigation version. Put this sensitive magnetometer on a plane. You get very sensitive measurements of the local magnetic field. Once they have a region mapped, you can get exact positioning just from measuring magnetic fields.

You can extrapolate from SandboxAQ and get long range detection of a human heart. I don't know if it's real, but if so it's probably came out of that research effort.

that's the work site. The residential town is about 10km SW of that marker.

For elementary school age kids, maybe even middle school, try getting them started with the app "Euclidea".

They won't think of it as math. It's gamified geometric constructions. Starts simple, "how do you bisect an angle" with a compass and a straight edge. It goes to a very high level that will challenge anyone.

Yeah, people underestimate how hard it is to get a movie into a theatre AND get people to pay for a ticket.

Hollywood can barely get any well made movies past $100 million these days unless it's based on some well known franchise (minecraft, Captain America, Snow White) or it has some well known actor.

PBRs have contracts with medical insurance. They get paid based on how much money they "save" the insurance company.

"Save" is defined as list price minus contracted price that the insurance pays for the drug.

PBRs manipulate the list price to be higher so that they "save" the insurance company more money.

They also manipulate the co-pays so that patients will choose drugs that "save" the most, as opposed to the lowest price drug.

Technically they want to limit indirect costs to 15%. This currently ranges from 50%-100%. Indirect costs have two components, facilities and administration.

Facilites are the cost of buildings, electricity, janitorial service, etc. Think of this as things that might be included in the rent if you were renting a place to do the research.

Administration costs are mostly salaries for people, administrative and clerical staff. Not the people directly doing the research (that's a direct cost), but the people in charge of safety/compliance/legal, etc.

Administrative costs have been capped at 25% for a few decades. Facilities costs are not capped.

I think part of the problem is that universities have lots of people who do one job and that job is not everyday. For instance, where I'm at we have two people in charge of summer enrollment. That seems to be it. They are way way overworked for about two weeks at beginning of the summer. I have no idea what they do the other 50 weeks of the year. I think their boss is happy as long as they deal with summer courses.

Same with siliconinvestor.com

It was an early stock discussion forum. It grew rapidly when search engines started indexing everything and this forum had a URL for each message that was easily indexable.

It's still around, but nothing like the old days.