Weird & Interesting science, take 2

[classicdrogn]

YouTube's flood of "science" spam


non-embedded

[robkelk]

While the scientists involved have many different specializations, the science being discussed in the article is sociology.

Pop-sci, not peer-reviewed. Set aside a half-hour or so for this one.

Drag and science unite as LGBTQ researchers bring their work to the stage — for inclusion

[classicdrogn]

YouTube alt-/pop-sci channel has an interesting (if somewhat dubious) video about the carvings at Göbekli Tepe monoliths in Turkey being a record of the Younger Dryas extinction being caused by a comet, also tying it to the underground ancient cities found "nearby and all across Turkey" and the story of Yima in Zoroastrianism. If nothing else, the timeline for the age of the site does generally align with the 10,000-ish BCE date.


link

[robkelk]

JAXA schedules August launch for 'Moon Sniper'

The first thing I though of was a Bubblegum Crisis / Sailor Moon crossover... but, no, it's a lunar lander that's supposed to be able to land more accurately than other landers, hence the "sniper" part of the name.

[classicdrogn]

This is more engineering than research, with a heavy sprinkle of shilling since the video was sponsored by the company working on the project, but it's still at least fun to watch the hardware geeks geeking out. Sadly, it does not actually explain how their engine design is different from a Wankel rotary that well, though as I recall Wankels have a roughly triangular rotor rather than the oblong shown here. On the plus side, they do have an actual working model that's applied to a real world device, unlike a lot of "This revolutionary new powerplant will change everything!!!1!" clickbait vaporware.


link

Still a bit clickbaity since the titular liquid piston is dismissed as an impractical science toy in the first few minutes, but there's a cool fish cannon device to close that bit off so insert "I'll allow it!" meme here.

[robkelk]

The pop-sci outlets are calling this "two planets in the same orbit". ESO is somewhat more cautious

Tentative co-orbital submillimeter emission within the Lagrangian region L5 of the protoplanet PDS 70 b

[classicdrogn]

Well, statistically, any stable configuration should be out there in vast numbers, but being close enough for us to detect is a whole other roll of the dice. Still cool either way.

[Labster]

The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

This one is pretty huge by the standards of this thread, and almost deserves its own thread, except the material is brittle and can't carry that much current or support a large magnetic field while superconducting.  But hey, this is big progress, and at least it's using lead and not some rare-earth that would be too expensive to use everywhere.

It's hot off the preprint so no news stories yet, so you get the study, and a fine and elegantly crafted link to a Hacker News discussion on it.

[Bob Schroeck]

Reading the Hacker News thread, I must state that I love the phrase "Nobel prize winning spongy crap". Just sayin'.

[Labster]

Breaking Superconductor News - Dr. Derek Lowe gives us a somewhat less technical description of the news from yesterday.

Cheap materials, not hard for labs everywhere to make samples, and a critical temperature of 121°C. Yes please! We’re all on pins and needles waiting for replication.

[classicdrogn]

121°C? Damn, you could actually use that for, say, circuit traces in a computer, to shave off a few more tiny fractions of a second per operation getting stuff from RAM to CPU to GPU and so on. If the stuff is fragile, it would probably be easier to keeep it useable with a solid subtrate like that than grid-scale power distribution, and computing hjas traditionally been one of the commercial sectors that fights tooth and nail to get a fractional advantage by bringing new materials and processes to commercial viability.

[Dartz]

Some audiphiles are already figuring out how to turn it into speakers.

[Bob Schroeck]

121°C?

No, that's a typo.

It should be 127°C, at least according to the linked article.

Still, like the author said, "The phrase 'boiling-water superconductor' is not one that I had ever used until yesterday, trust me on that."

[Labster]

What’s six or seven degrees between friends?

[robkelk]

What’s six or seven degrees between friends?

With six or seven degrees, you should be able to get to Kevin Bacon.

[Bob Schroeck]

Important Safety Tip!

[Norgarth]

Anton Petrov - If this Superconductor is real, it's a Nobel Prize! But let's talk first

[classicdrogn]

Linguistics is science, right?

Here's a Stack Exchange thread on the origin and varients of the phrase "Let's blow this Popsicle stand!"

The teal deer is that "blow" in that sense probobaly originates from turn of the (20th) century crime drama if not actual street slang, and after several mutations the specific wording was probably popularized by being used in the movie War Games anda couple of other late '70s/early '80s media pieces.

[classicdrogn]

There's a Dog Star and a Cat Star, and even multiple Cow Stars, but how about a Turkey Star?

The essential amino acid tryptophan's emission spectra was detected in star cluster IGC 348, also known as Collinder 41, Gingrich 1, and Theia 17. No word yet on whether these space turkeys can shuck and jive.

[Labster]

If there really is a Turkey Star (presumably rolled by the Prince of All Cosmos), can we get Erdogan to move there?

Back on the big story, the superconductor candidate LK99: A Room-Temperature Superconductor? New Developments. There is lots of drama because apparently on of the authors published too early because he was afraid of getting scooped, which led to him scooping some of his coauthors and them pushing out another paper to preprint that wasn’t ready either. All of that is not really relevant to if it works, though.

And does it? A few labs have tried and failed, which is apparently normal in materials science? One Chinese lab claims to have replicated it in a YouTube video of something floating. The original group said that it only superconducted on 10% of their samples… and they don’t know why. On the other hand, a couple of new preprints suggest that the physics makes sense in their computer models of LK99. And:

They also predict that substituting gold atoms into the Pb(1) site could lead to a material with very similar properties, which will be an extremely interesting idea to put to the test.

Oh good, something for audiophiles!

[robkelk]

The Register: Scientists at Japan's Chiba University claim they've developed a method that uses lasers to create diamond wafers that could one day power next-gen semiconductors.

(No, I'm not going to use their clickbait article title.)

Mind you, what I'm most interested in is the part about using diamond wafers as semiconductor bases. Apparently, that's trickier than it appears at first glance.

And why am I not surprised that De Beers has a subsidiary that makes synthetic diamonds...

[Bob Schroeck]

Breaking Superconductor News - Dr. Derek Lowe gives us a somewhat less technical description of the news from yesterday.

Cheap materials, not hard for labs everywhere to make samples, and a critical temperature of 121°C. Yes please! We’re all on pins and needles waiting for replication.

Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

[Bob Schroeck]

And in other news...

Cosmic Question Mark Spotted in Deep Space Suggests the Universe Is Stumped

And it's not just pareidolia having its way with a vague shape. It's a goddamned question mark. Of course, it's also so far away that it's probably several things lining up just so, and thus a classic example of the Law of Big Numbers ("the more random samples you take/generate, the higher the chance of you coming across something unexpected that surprises you with its apparent non-randomness").

[Bob Schroeck]

Lawrence Livermore Labs finally recreates fusion ignition after months of failures.

[Bob Schroeck]

Breaking Superconductor News - Dr. Derek Lowe gives us a somewhat less technical description of the news from yesterday.

Cheap materials, not hard for labs everywhere to make samples, and a critical temperature of 121°C. Yes please! We’re all on pins and needles waiting for replication.

Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

Or maybe not...