Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

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There is an episode of Sex Love Robots about three robot tourists exploring the ruins of Earth after humanity has died off. They discover that the cause of the apocalypse was that humans gave cats thumbs so they did need us any more.
 
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When Mogul's team reexamined the LNMS (Pioneer 13 probe) data from Venus' lower and middle clouds (a potential habitable zone on the planet), they found signals that look a great deal like phosphine, the researchers wrote. The scientists also found definitive evidence for atoms of phosphorus in the atmosphere, which likely came from a heavier gas such as phosphine.

LNMS wasn't built to hunt phosphine-like compounds, and would have had a hard time distinguishing the gas from other molecules that have similar masses. But Pioneer 13's sample did have evidence of some molecule present in the gas that had the same mass as phosphine — in amounts that match the levels described in the Nature Astronomy paper.
 

Fionalein

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There is an episode of Sex Love Robots about three robot tourists exploring the ruins of Earth after humanity has died off. They discover that the cause of the apocalypse was that humans gave cats thumbs so they did need us any more.
Is that a show? Is it recommendable?
 
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This is pretty frickin' cool!



My current location keeps going in and out of the Atlantic. But in the early Triassic I lived in the mountains! :p
 
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This is pretty frickin' cool!



My current location keeps going in and out of the Atlantic. But in the early Triassic I lived in the mountains! :p
I already know the answer for where I currently live... there wasn't anything 75Mya. It can only track about 260Mya which isn't too far from what I expected.
Now for my birthplace...
 

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Asteroid Bennu up *really* close: Article

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to give the asteroid a blow job on Oct. 20th. No, really. They plan to use nitrogen gas to blow small rocks and dust into a collection chamber for return to Earth. Since gravity on this asteroid is crazy low, they aren't landing. Rather they will slowly approach with the collection arm extended ahead. When it touches they will try to get a sample, and then the arm's springiness will push the spacecraft away again. Thrusters near the surface are a bad idea. They would just blow stuff around everywhere, contaminating the area around the asteroid.

 

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"Gargoyles breathe fire"? Wut? They're waterspouts.

This could be actually interesting without the bad mythology.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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A new study from two scientists comes to the conclusion, that the probability of a collapse of our civilisation in the next decades is around 90%.

In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a stochastic growth process driven by a continuous time random walk, which depicts the technological evolution of human kind, in conjunction with a deterministic generalised logistic model for humans-forest interaction and we evaluate the probability of avoiding the self-destruction of our civilisation. Based on the current resource consumption rates and best estimate of technological rate growth our study shows that we have very low probability, less than 10% in most optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse.

 
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Alan Turing considered telepathy as a possible way of demonstrating computer intelligence. Contrariwise Penrose, today, thinks that quantum physics means that AI is impossible, because handwave quantum spritualism something. There's a long history of scientists treating psychics and spiritualism as a real thing. In the '60s and '70s it was still semi-defensible.
 

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It's a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can't escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object's matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet.

If that object is a star, the process of being shredded (or "spaghettified") by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole occurs outside the event horizon, and part of the star's original mass is ejected violently outward. This in turn can form a rotating ring of matter (aka an accretion disk) around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. Those jets are one way astronomers can indirectly infer the presence of a black hole. Now astronomers have recorded the final death throes of a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole in just such a "tidal disruption event" (TDE), described in a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
 
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A couple of quotes to give you the "flavor" of the article.

Last week, craving sweets, Colin Purrington remembered the Twinkies.

He'd purchased them back in 2012 for sentimental reasons when he heard that Hostess Brands was going bankrupt and Twinkies might disappear forever.

"When there's no desserts in the house, you get desperate," says Purrington, who went down to the basement and retrieved the old box of snack cakes, fulling intending to enjoy several.
...
The researchers used a bone marrow biopsy tool to sort of drill through the tough outer layer of the gray, mummified Twinkie. "We certainly hit the marrow of the Twinkie and quickly realized that there was still some cream filling on the inside," Kasson says.

Hitting the soft interior was unexpected — they'd thought it would be hard all the way through. "It seems that the fungus was more interested in the cake on the outside than the filling on the inside," Lovett says.

 
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