Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Argent Stonecutter]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

An announcement by the FDA: the parmesan you have eaten may have been just wood pulp!

Yup, that's right. Many parmesan companies like Castle Cheese have been stretching original parmesan with wood pulp.

FDA Warns The Parmesan You Eat May Be Wood Pulp

The FDA is cracking down on companies that are lying about selling 100% Parmesan cheese

time.com

 

[danielravennest]

An announcement by the FDA: the parmesan you have eaten may have been just wood pulp!

Yup, that's right. Many parmesan companies like Castle Cheese have been stretching original parmesan with wood pulp.

FDA Warns The Parmesan You Eat May Be Wood Pulp

The FDA is cracking down on companies that are lying about selling 100% Parmesan cheese

time.com

Many plant-based foods contain cellulose naturally. It is part of what is called "dietary fiber". Humans can't digest them, but our gut bacteria can make use of them. Cellulose and lignin are the molecules that give plant cell walls the strength to stand up, so it is found in pretty much anything that comes from plants.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Telegraph is running this (so not a particularly reliable source) but it got me thinking


I tried to review what I know about UFOs, from the basics, which is that there apparently exists a large collection of films, photographs and videos, and of reports from observers of varying degrees of credibility, of what they've seen or think they've seen in the sky, and no one is sure what any particular image shows or what anyone actually saw, but whatever it was, nothing seems to have happened because of this object, whatever it was, and since then, nothing.

So we've got what appear to be objects of various shapes and sizes and no one can say what they are, so all we can say is that they appear to be objects of some sort, and since they're up in the air and don't seem to be falling, they must be either flying or floating, but that's about all we make out.

Fair enough, but how do you get from that to space aliens?

I mean, if someone shows me a picture of something that certainly looks like a saucer-shaped object in the sky, just as some clouds or pieces of toast certainly look like faces, then why on earth would I entertain the possibility that it it's a vehicle that's somehow arrived from some impossibly vast distance and then vanished, rather decide that we don't know what it is simply because we don't have sufficient evidence, context, or understanding of the psychology of cognition and visual perception to make sense of what we're seeing?

Obviously the military need to study this kind of image closely, because if whatever it shows belongs to the military of another country, then they want to know about it, and if it's something belonging to the Russians or Chinese they've never seen before then that needs urgent investigation, and similarly NASA and air traffic control want to know about it, too.

But if at the end of it all, all the experts say, "Nope, no idea what it is, but doesn't seem a particular problem, at least for us, at the moment," then OK, then we've got some image that we can't make sense of. What follows?

A particular image or video might show all manner of things, but if we start to entertain possibilities that defy what we know of the laws of physics, then maybe it's a fire-breathing dragon or a witch on a broomstick. How can we tell?

Nope, no idea what it is. Does it matter?

 

[danielravennest]

It's not every day you see part of a launch pad driving down the road. This is part of SpaceX's orbital launch pad in south Texas for their giant Starship rocket.

Zoomable image of the entire launch site. The above photo is a section of the vertical integration tower, which will be used to pick up the rocket stages and stack them on the launch pad.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The Pentagon does not actually think UFOs exist after all. Or, well, they understand that people sometimes see things in the sky they don't recognize, but they're not really interested.

Literally all of the major news outlets are missing the real meat of this story, so let me lay it out for you.

Back in like the 90's, then-senator Harry Reid had a very wealthy campaign contributor who was a UFO nut. This guy convinced Reid to basically mandate the military to finance his campaign donor's private "UFO research" using "potential military applications of new scientific discoveries" as the pretext. The resulting program, with Reid's UFO-nut buddy as the exclusive contractor, lasted for many years and the capstone of this program was a long rambling "report" about a haunted ranch in Utah and the Pentagon was like "of course we spent millions on this truckload of fertilizer, fantastic" and canceled the program without releasing the embarrassing report to the public.

Now 20 years later said UFO-nut and his friends have been pushing documents from this cancelled program to media outlets, hoping to create interest in a creatively-retold story that the Pentagon was secretly "investigating UFOs" for years and hadn't been telling anybody. Last year these reports did catch the attention of senators Rubio and Warner, who then mandated that the military spend a year seriously studying UFOs "just in case they might be like Russian drones or something" (even though literally nobody demanding the study actually believes this), and in any case at the end of it release every single document they've ever made or obtained regarding UFOs to Congress.

That report is due this summer, which has put the wider UFO-nut community in a tizzy that DISCLOSURE OF ALIENS is going to happen this year (which is ironic considering that the particular UFO-nuts who started all of this at the beginning don't even believe it's aliens), and that's what is prompting all of these lazy news stories.

You can read all of the confusing details here.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Not all boarding operations occur on hostile ships.

If I was some yacht owner and some government official boarded my vessel this way and then it turned out that he just wanted to check my zarpe or something, I'd be cheesed and probably try to show him up somehow.

"Oh yes, where did I leave that...oh that's right, I left it down in the garage on the console of my personal toy submarine that I can actually get into and drive around under the ocean with, which is stowed right next to the beach-landing craft holding my collection of motorcycles that my guests and I sometimes enjoy riding around uninhabited islands during shore excursions. Follow me, please - the garage is right down this way, past the helicopter storage hangar."

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Mast Upgrade: UK experiment could sweep aside fusion hurdle

Results from a UK experiment could help clear a hurdle to achieving commercial fusion power.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[danielravennest]

Mast Upgrade: UK experiment could sweep aside fusion hurdle

Results from a UK experiment could help clear a hurdle to achieving commercial fusion power.

www.bbc.co.uk

The success of the exhaust system for Mast Upgrade delivers a boost to plans for a prototype fusion power plant in the UK called Step. It is expected to come online sometime in the 2040s.

By which time solar and wind will be taking over the world. So too little and too late as far as climate change.

 

[Noodles]

China has successfully landed on Mars [Updated]

China has become only the second nation to make a soft landing on the red planet.

arstechnica.com

I know "China sucks" and all but I am.kindmof disapointed I didn't even know they were trying. This sort of thing just feels like it goes beyond all the petty bull shit we do on Earth.

 

[Essence Lumin]

An announcement by the FDA: the parmesan you have eaten may have been just wood pulp!

Yup, that's right. Many parmesan companies like Castle Cheese have been stretching original parmesan with wood pulp.

FDA Warns The Parmesan You Eat May Be Wood Pulp

The FDA is cracking down on companies that are lying about selling 100% Parmesan cheese

time.com

If you're old enough you may remember Fresh Horizons bread whose top three ingredients were water, white flour and powdered cellulose aka wood pulp. It was brought to you by the Wonder Bread people and advertised as being high in fiber.

Pulp Fact – Now I Know

nowiknow.com

 

[Free]

I know "China sucks" and all

 

[Noodles]

My point I guess was more that everyone was ignoring it because it was China.

 

[Free]

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

"Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." - Alexander Pope
"It did not last: the Devil howling “Ho!
Let Einstein be!”, restored the status quo." - J. C. Squire

 

[Free]

 

[Govi]

Manshonyagger

 

[Free]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Digested week: should we tell Jeff Bezos his rocket looks like a penis?

The Amazon founder prepares to lift off in his 60ft rocket … and why we’re all swearing a lot more

www.theguardian.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Looks like The Guardian has just discovered that rockets are phallic-shaped.