Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Free]

Last blue moon of the decade to rise Saturday night

An unusual full moon will fill the sky on Saturday night -- a type of moon that won’t rise again until 2021.

[...]

This weekend’s full moon will be the third of four this spring, making it a blue moon. The first full moon of spring fell on March 20, 2019 at 9:43 p.m. EDT, less than four hours after the official start of spring.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Koalas have been declared "functionally extinct", as the number of living wild koalas has fallen below the minimum viable population.

 

[Tigger]

Someone needs to go find these Samsung people and slap them until they stop doing shit like this.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I've just gotten word that physicist Murray Gell-Mann died today, at 89. Gell-Mann won the Nobel in physics in the late 60's, having been one of two scientists who independently developed the concepts of quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons - foundational particle physics stuff nowadays. He also developed a few other ideas; there's a synopsis on wiki.

Perhaps not the most household-name scientist there is; but he sticks out in my mind personally because I actually met him! I had breakfast with him, in fact, and some other people, and got to chat with him. For an old person, he was pretty fun to talk to... In fact, I remember that I had the distinct honor of being the first person to inform the discoverer and namer of the quark that there was a Star Trek character named after his discovery. I guess Gell-Mann wasn't a Trek watcher, and he asked me about the character so I started to describe him. I said he was an alien who ran a bar on a space station and all this, and tried to explain what Ferengis look like. He shook his head and laughed, and said "They always gotta mess with the ears". ^^

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Just an Earth thing. I'm into those.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Pfizer had clues its blockbuster drug could prevent Alzheimer’s. Why didn’t it tell the world? | Washington Post

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The good news: The FCC has just cleared phone companies and service providers to use techologies that block robocalls to all customers by default. The bad news: the FCC declined to add a provision requiring phone companies who use these technologies to offer them for free, meaning that in the near future you might be able to rid yourself of the robocall menace but you might have to pay for it as an option, or might simply have a new fee tacked onto your phone bill automatically unless you opt out of the service.

 

[Free]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

That's preposterous, I have it on good authority those stones were too heavy to have ever been moved by humans meaning they must've been placed by aliens. Get your facts straight!

 

[Free]

That is a lot of ladybugs.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Myficals]

Koalas have been declared "functionally extinct", as the number of living wild koalas has fallen below the minimum viable population.

No, koalas are not 'functionally extinct', but they are in trouble

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

To correct a mistake in the tweet, the late-model car in this video is a 2009 Chevy Malibu, not a 2019. Versus a 1959 Chevy Bel Air.

ETA: Forget the tweet; found the original HD vid:

 

[Free]

Mass anomaly detected under the moon's largest crater

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a Baylor University study.

phys.org

"Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That's roughly how much unexpected mass we detected," said lead author Peter B. James,

Ph.D., assistant professor of planetary geophysics in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.The crater itself is oval-shaped, as wide as 2,000 kilometers—roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C.—and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon.

This is how 2001: A Space Odyssey starts. Minus the apes dancing around the big pry bar buried in the dirt.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Is a "100-year flood", a flood so high that we'd normally only expect to see one of that magnitude once every hundred years or so in that location? Wellllll....no, not at all really. This guy explains:

 

[danielravennest]

Mass anomaly detected under the moon's largest crater

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a Baylor University study.

phys.org

The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon is probably not the largest crater in the Solar System. The northern part of Mars is about 6 km lower than the southern part. Planetary scientists think it got that way when a Pluto-sized object smacked into the planet. The "crater", if that is the word for something that spans 40% of the planet's circumference, is over 5000 km across.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Still not as impressive as Herschel crater on Mimas.

 

[Govi]

Still not as impressive as Herschel crater on Mimas.

Clearly, Minas has been in some significant battles.