Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[danielravennest]

"Percy?"

Perseverance takes too long to type. Its a nickname.

 

[Roxanne Blue]

Percy dangling from the skycrane just before landing. This is one frame from what will be a landing video, which will take more time to download:

 

[danielravennest]

Perseverance landing video:


There are four satellites in orbit that are being used to relay data from Mars to Earth. Each "pass" delivers 100-700 MB, due to varying paths across the sky relative to the rover. It took about two days to relay these videos, in addition to other rover data.

Five total cameras were used. Two looking up from the backshell to the parachute, one looking down from the skycrane, and two looking up and down from the rover itself.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

A potential model for a real physical warp drive

A pair of researchers at Applied Physics has created what they describe as the first general model for a warp drive, a model for a space craft that could travel faster than the speed of light, without actually breaking the laws of physics. Alexey Bobrick, and Gianni Martire have written a paper...

phys.org

A pair of researchers at Applied Physics has created what they describe as the first general model for a warp drive, a model for a space craft that could travel faster than the speed of light, without actually breaking the laws of physics. Alexey Bobrick, and Gianni Martire have written a paper describing their ideas for a warp drive and have published it in IOP's Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Bobrick and Martire start with the idea of an Alcubierre warp drive, a concept developed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994—he envisioned it as spacecraft that could contract space time in front of the vehicle while expanding it behind the craft. But such a craft would require a massive amount of negative energy, which would not be feasible for a real spacecraft. Bobrick and Martire suggest instead that a massive gravitational force could be used to bend space time. The trick is finding a way to compress a planet-sized mass to a manageable spacecraft-module size in order to use its gravity.

Oh, is that all it takes? Here's the paper: Introducing physical warp drives - IOPscience

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Beebo Brink]

New Zealand Designer Makes Ingenious Solar-Powered Skylight That Desalinates Water For Drinking

Powering LED light, purifying salt water, and utilizing solar power, Henry Goglau's solar desalination still is a Lexus Design Award finalist.

www.goodnewsnetwork.org

Clean-Energy, No-Cost Skylight Makes Seawater Drinkable

Designer Henry Glogau's no-cost desalinating skylight is a finalist in the Lexus Design Award 2021.

interestingengineering.com

 

[Free]

Juno Spacecraft Solves A Mystery About Zodiacal Light - SlashGear

Many people have probably witnessed a phenomenon known as zodiacal light and not realized what they were seeing. Zodiacal light happens when people look at…

www.slashgear.com

 

[Sovereignty]

Heads up: Some sea slugs grow new bodies after decapitation

 

[Free]

Heads up: Some sea slugs grow new bodies after decapitation

*Some* - like the evil ones!

 

[Sovereignty]

*Some* - like the evil ones!

The cool kids are always evil.

When these sea slugs eat a certain type of algae they can photosynthesize their food from sunlight and oxygen, just like a plant, for about 10 days, Yusa said. What’s probably happening after decapitation is that the head sort of acts like a plant, he said. It turns a shade of green and gets its energy from oxygen and sunlight. The fact that it becomes tiny helps, he said.

 

[Noodles]

I have a personal Conspiracy Theory (???) That Dinosaurs were actually an advanced civilization that left Earth. A lot of the minerals we mine up are the remains of their structures.

Thank you for coming to Shitty TED Talks.

 

[Erich Templar]

I have a personal Conspiracy Theory (???) That Dinosaurs were actually an advanced civilization that left Earth. A lot of the minerals we mine up are the remains of their structures.

Thank you for coming to Shitty TED Talks.

I am intrigued by your theory and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Sovereignty]

More bad news.

 

[Essence Lumin]

More bad news.

I can find no evidence that this disease will totally wipe out the cocoa plants. Just this tweet.

 

[Soen Eber]

I am intrigued by your theory and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Sounds like a Marvel Avengers fanfic I read, except that they used Celestials . Why can't fun things like this be a conspiracy theory?

 

[Sovereignty]

I can find no evidence that this disease will totally wipe out the cocoa plants. Just this tweet.

It doesn't have to wipe out the plant species, just make the industry unprofitable or unrecognizable.

From Wikipedia:

Cacao swollen shoot virus

(CSSV) is a plant pathogenic virus of the family Caulimoviridae that primarily infects cacao trees. It decreases cacao yield within the first year of infection, and usually kills the tree within a few years. Symptoms vary by strain, but leaf discoloration, stem/root swelling, and die-back generally occur. The virus is transmitted from tree to tree by mealybug vectors. It was first discovered in Ghana in 1936, and is currently endemic in Togo, Ghana and Nigeria. Over 200 million trees have already been claimed by this disease, which has prompted Ghana to launch the most ambitious and costly eradication effort of any country in the world against a viral plant disease.

Perhaps Anne Simon would be viewed as alarmist by others in her field (I don't know), but the problem is quite real. A reply to her tweet by virologist @masteriwagra remarks:

"I think CSSV is a 'silent-but-deadly epidemic' for cacao. Infected trees are prone to black pod rot and VSD too." [no fart jokes, please]

It would seem that the virus may be flying under the radar to some extent. Of course, my hurried search through Wikipedia doesn't tell the whole story. I suspect Anne Simon, PhD knows more about it than I do.

The way we do agriculture makes these kinds of events more likely. The problems with bananas are well known (Wikipedia).

While in no danger of outright extinction, the most common edible banana cultivar Cavendish (extremely popular in Europe and the Americas) could become unviable for large-scale cultivation in the next 10–20 years. Its predecessor 'Gros Michel', discovered in the 1820s, suffered this fate. Like almost all bananas, Cavendish lacks genetic diversity, which makes it vulnerable to diseases, threatening both commercial cultivation and small-scale subsistence farming. Some commentators remarked that those variants which could replace what much of the world considers a "typical banana" are so different that most people would not consider them the same fruit, and blame the decline of the banana on monogenetic cultivation driven by short-term commercial motives.

 

[Sovereignty]

 

[Free]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Hooray, we can grow now mice up to some point in an artificial uterus! You just need to extract a fertilized egg from a female mouse just after the act, put it into some relatively simple machinery and you can grow it up there until day 11 of 20.

This is basic research - has not been done with human eggs yet.

Scientists Grow Mouse Embryos in a Mechanical Womb (Published 2021)

Biologists have long held that a fetus needs a living uterus to develop. Maybe not anymore.

www.nytimes.com