Weird & Interesting science

[nocarename]

Zeroeth, first and third laws would all still hold, so this would only be a second law violation. (Only, hah!)

I suspect that they've found a new and exciting way to tap an induced current from somewhere in the lab or to extract energy from pressure changes that they haven't accounted for instead.

I hope it's real, but uh, not holding my breath.

[hazard]

We'll have to wait to see if this is actually a thing, but if this can actually harvest energy from the Brownian motion this gives interesting implications.

[Norgarth]

Astronomers find monstrous black hole with 6 Galaxies caught in it's gravitational web
https://www.sciencealert.com/monstrous-b...vHp8Ub3CHg

[Bob Schroeck]

Middle school student achieves nuclear fusion in his family playroom

[robkelk]

Some people claim that the homeless mismanage money.

This scientific study says otherwise.

[Labster]

Posting this here for lack of a better thread.  Most of you are probably not aware that I'm a dropout from graduate school, where I was studying climatology in the atmospheric science department at UC Davis.  I honestly wasn't a very good researcher, and I finally hit the level that being a good student isn't enough.  Well, my one research idea, that I never really got around to figuring out how to do, was to try to get a better handle on the influence of marine stratocumulus (a.k.a. the marine layer, alias June Gloom) on climate change.  The effects of clouds have always been very difficult to model in climate models, because of the difficulty in connecting small-scale phenomena to the global circulation models that need to run for a long time.

Well, anyway, some researchers finally published a few studies on the topic, and there's an article with the someone scary title: A World without Clouds

The good: They say that they basically couldn't do this kind of study 10 years ago, so maybe I would have been spinning my wheels waiting for better computing time, even if I had been a good researcher.  They did some neat stuff binding a high-resolution cloud physics model into a general circulation model for climate, replacing a lot of the parameterizations (read: guesswork) with something more physical.  The "future work" idea of doing samples of cloud physics at multiple sites in the GCM sounds great.

The bad: I had hypothesized a slight negative feedback on marine stratocumulus, maybe out of hope.  They show a slight positive feedback on climate change, which is fairly intuitive: a warmer atmosphere is more turbulent, and therefore the clouds "burn off" faster.  Less clouds mean less white things (high albedo) to reflect light back to space.  As always, positive feedback is bad for you, because it means global warming happens faster.

The ugly:  Oh gosh, how do I even begin.  So one of the things about climate change is that there's bound to be something in the paleoclimate data where we've seen it before.  Four billion years of Earth had some pretty wild swings, and if you add in Venus and Mars too, it's just about everything possible.  The direct causes are different -- like asteroids and microbes and volcanoes, but the gases produced are the same. 

Anyway, they seem to have linked the disappearance of stratocumuli to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.  So if their research is correct, we have something of a hard ceiling at 1200ppm of CO2.  If we exceed that value, then all of the stratocumulus clouds disappear.  And at that point, we get an additional 4°C of warming just from the missing clouds, for a total of +8°C.  To get the clouds back, CO2 would have to go all the way down to 2010 levels or so, because of the hysteresis. So this is a fucking nightmare, right?  It probably happened before, with the PETM and it's +8° temperature rise, and it was a disaster then, too.

This is also a feasible level of carbon dioxide.  We're at 411ppm now, but under the "business as usual" scenarios, we hit 1200ppm by 2100.  It's ugh, my intuition was right that this was important, but I didn't deliver.  And I find out that there's a plausible doomsday scenario lurking behind it.  At least we now have an "avoid utter disaster" target.

[Norgarth]

Black hole kills star by 'spagettification' as telescopes watch
https://www.space.com/black-hole-star-de...o2eE1DPZQo

[RMH999]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02895-0

Actual room temperature (up to 15 C/59 F) superconductor. Just requires 2.6 million atmospheres pressure...

[Norgarth]

Scientists map the DNA of Scimitar Cat (a breed of Saber-tooth cat) from Yukon fossil
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yuk...VlynpU6bVg

[DHBirr]

NASA is now a recording studio, releasing a playlist of sounds generated from various cosmic effects.  The Marsquakes are underwhelming, but some of the others should inspire awe.

The collection of sonic snippets is comprised from recordings of plasma waves, planetary auroras, and X-rays that have been rendered into sound for human ears.

A few decades back, there was a similar release as a result of one of our space probes entering Jupiter's magnetic field.  My thought was that it sounded like a car crash.

-----
"Oh, my people had many gods. There was Conformity, and Authority, and Expense Account, and Opinion. And there was Status, whose symbols were many, and who rode in the great chariot Cadillac, which was almost a god itself. And there was Atombomb, the dread destroyer, who would some day come to end the world." — Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, H. Beam Piper

[robkelk]

Forget fake vampires and ghouls; here's a real life zombie story from nature

[DHBirr]

Inhospitable and then some: Astronomers have discovered an "extreme" planet – Earth-sized, but ... ye gods!

...the most inhospitable planet ever that rains rocks, with 60 mile deep lava seas and winds of more than 3,000 mph ... four times the speed of sound ... temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Centigrade on one side - hot enough to vaporise rock.

But they plunge to below minus 200C on the other - cold enough to freeze nitrogen.

"We will beam down only red-shirt personnel to explore this planet," Captain Jerk decreed, shortly before the mutiny that led to him being packed into a photon torpedo casing and launched on the most direct trajectory into the intergalactic void.

[hazard]

So IIRC Starfleet switched designation colours between the original series and TNG eras, with security taking yellow and command taking red...

[DHBirr]

So IIRC Starfleet switched designation colours between the original series and TNG eras, with security taking yellow and command taking red...

I would've thought the captain's name rhyming with "Kirk" was a sufficient indicator that I was indeed talking in terms of ST:TOS.

"Commanders wear gold, security red, and we've noticed which ones wind up dead." — "Security Strike Blues," filksong by Cecilia Eng

[hazard]

Sure, but just saying that in TNG era that gets only funnier.

[Shepherd]

Oddly, the death rate of redshirts seems to be exaggerated:
https://digg.com/2019/star-trek-shirt-co...h-data-viz

The last line of the link:

If you look at the overall number of characters who wear red shirts in "The Original Series" and compare them to the ones who were killed off, redshirt characters actually have a higher survival rate than, say, characters wearing blue or gold shirts, who are much smaller in number.

So apparently redshirts only die off in large numbers because there are a large number of redshirts.

[classicdrogn]

Which also makes sense if you think about it; most of the people aboard the ship are in fact primarily tasked with operating and maintaining the ship, while blueshirts are science or medical specialists and gold (or green) are those lofty denizens of Officer Country.

[Norgarth]

Wandering star shook up pre-historic Solar System 70,000 years ago
https://astronomy.com/news/2018/03/wande...HIYFhGuh54

[Norgarth]

NASA reestablishes contact with Voyager 2
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...Rv2tKnM45U

[DHBirr]

Asteroid Bennu, that the OSIRIS-REx probe landed on ... seems to be hollow.

[Bob Schroeck]

For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky...

[Star Ranger4]

I've heard that as a Title, but can't at the moment recall if it was a short story or a full up novel.

either way it had to do with a multi generational ship who's passengers had lost the knowledge that the 'world' actually was a ship sailing between the stars.

[nocarename]

Star Trek, Season 3 Episode 10

[Star Ranger4]

Think it was also a short story or novel NoCare..... Someone like Heinlein or Clark?

[robkelk]

"For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" - Star Trek (original series), season 3 episode (one of the better Season 3 eps IMHO)

Probably inspired at least partially by Orphans of the Sky by Heinlein, published in two parts in Astounding in 1941 and collected into a standalone book in 1963.