General Science Thread

[DZ]

Less specific.

What happens when an ice cube the size of Delaware breaks loose into the ocean? We will likely soon find out. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...701c?section=&

At 21,000 square miles, Larsen C is the largest ice shelf in the region, according to a 2015 report. In recent years, however, what was once a small fracture has rapidly moved through the frozen structure, widening to more than 1,000 feet. The crack, scientists wrote in last year’s report, “is likely in the near future to generate the largest calving event since the 1980s and result in a new minimum area for the ice shelf

[23dpg]

Why would you listen to these so-called scientists who are using crack?

The crack scientists wrote in last year’s report, “is likely in the near future to generate the largest calving event since the 1980s and result in a new minimum area for the ice shelf

Plus, that's not even a grammatically correct sentence.

[23dpg]

Seriously, wow.
The nearby Larsen B ice shelf suddenly collapsed after the Antarctic summer in 2002. The ice shelf has existed since the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago. (NASA/AP)

[23dpg]

The Mariana Trench has always fascinated me. 14 facts about it.

http://viraldiggers.com/14-incredibl...h-fascinating/

[23dpg]

[23dpg]

Even with 8800m mountains and 11,000m ocean trenches, the earth is much smoother than a pool cue ball.

So, if a billiard ball were enlarged to the size of Earth, the maximum allowable bump (mountain) or dent (trench) would be 28,347 metres.


http://www.curiouser.co.uk/facts/smooth_earth.htm

[DZ]

Challenger Deep is - apparently - a challenge 3 times more dangerous/expensive/hard than going to the moon. Or the aliens no longer let us go down there, either.
\

The cue-ball fact is fascinating. Thank you - hadn't heard that.

[billyberu]

I recall hearing of a physicist who was able to reconcile quantum physics with classic physics by theorizing that the universe is a holographic projection.

It bears repeating that we are on the cusp of understanding things about our physical universe that are simply amazing.

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[DZ]

I recall hearing of a physicist who was able to reconcile quantum physics with classic physics by theorizing that the universe is a holographic projection.

It bears repeating that we are on the cusp of understanding things about our physical universe that are simply amazing.

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Leonard Susskind is famous for being one of the first to find the holographic principle. That comes from marrying QM and General relativity around a black hole, and the information paradox.

I don't understand it. But I don't think he claimed to marry QM and Newtonian, it was more just a way of linking GR and QM in some ways.

The "theory of everything" that Einstein pursued, and everyone since, is the object of String Theory, which looks great in math, but has a real difficult time being proven. the LHC hasn't found super-symmetry, which is a big blow to string theorists.

Susskind is a great guy to listen to, Jewish New Yorker out in California, he was one of 3 co-inventors of String Theory, then he left it, solved the holographic principle, and is now into quantum computing at age 78.

[Markburn1]

Awhile back I wrote of my young grandson's interest in chemical reactions. His working Volcano has produced three eruptions so far and the next stage is an accompanying earthquake. He's pretty meticulous about measuring the chemicals and mixing them at the optimum times to produce a lava flow.

He has that ongoing experiment and he has now built a cannon with rare earth magnets. There are five magnets equally spaced along a wooden half pipe. One end is the trigger and the other end shoots the cannon ball. There are nine steel balls used. Two each between magnets and on the business end. One is used at the trigger end. The trigger ball travels the half pipe to the first magnet and the collision propels the second ball after the first magnet to the second set. The sequence continues through the five magnets. Each collision speeds up the process until the last ball is fired out of the structure. He gets such a kick out of it and now we are exploring what kind of practical uses these magnets have. You can't believe the strength of these things. It takes a wooden stick to pry the steel balls loose to reset the cannon. There is a big warning to make sure no electronics are near this thing. Also a caution to not have any life forms in the way when it is activated. Pretty crazy.

Enjoy your kids. They will respond if you engage them.

[DZ]

Awhile back I wrote of my young grandson's interest in chemical reactions. His working Volcano has produced three eruptions so far and the next stage is an accompanying earthquake. He's pretty meticulous about measuring the chemicals and mixing them at the optimum times to produce a lava flow.

He has that ongoing experiment and he has now built a cannon with rare earth magnets. There are five magnets equally spaced along a wooden half pipe. One end is the trigger and the other end shoots the cannon ball. There are nine steel balls used. Two each between magnets and on the business end. One is used at the trigger end. The trigger ball travels the half pipe to the first magnet and the collision propels the second ball after the first magnet to the second set. The sequence continues through the five magnets. Each collision speeds up the process until the last ball is fired out of the structure. He gets such a kick out of it and now we are exploring what kind of practical uses these magnets have. You can't believe the strength of these things. It takes a wooden stick to pry the steel balls loose to reset the cannon. There is a big warning to make sure no electronics are near this thing. Also a caution to not have any life forms in the way when it is activated. Pretty crazy.

Enjoy your kids. They will respond if you engage them.

Earthquakes?

Exploding cannons?

Magnets?

Jeez, talking about "pretty crazy" or "pretty genius" is more like it.

[Jazzgirl_127]

Awhile back I wrote of my young grandson's interest in chemical reactions. His working Volcano has produced three eruptions so far and the next stage is an accompanying earthquake. He's pretty meticulous about measuring the chemicals and mixing them at the optimum times to produce a lava flow.

He has that ongoing experiment and he has now built a cannon with rare earth magnets. There are five magnets equally spaced along a wooden half pipe. One end is the trigger and the other end shoots the cannon ball. There are nine steel balls used. Two each between magnets and on the business end. One is used at the trigger end. The trigger ball travels the half pipe to the first magnet and the collision propels the second ball after the first magnet to the second set. The sequence continues through the five magnets. Each collision speeds up the process until the last ball is fired out of the structure. He gets such a kick out of it and now we are exploring what kind of practical uses these magnets have. You can't believe the strength of these things. It takes a wooden stick to pry the steel balls loose to reset the cannon. There is a big warning to make sure no electronics are near this thing. Also a caution to not have any life forms in the way when it is activated. Pretty crazy.

Enjoy your kids. They will respond if you engage them.

Have you seen the Kiwi Crate subscription boxes? They have all different age levels and they look awesome (my son's friend gets them and she's shown us a few, they look really neat and worth the money, hopefully I can talk my in-laws into that as a present for the boys instead of toys!

[Markburn1]

Have you seen the Kiwi Crate subscription boxes? They have all different age levels and they look awesome (my son's friend gets them and she's shown us a few, they look really neat and worth the money, hopefully I can talk my in-laws into that as a present for the boys instead of toys!

Haven't seen that. Just looked it up. Pretty cool.

I look for new things at a couple different places. There's a place in Carmel called Thinker Toys. Wonderful selection. National Geographic has some cool things online. I never pass when I see something that might stimulate the kid's mind. I have a couple things stashed away for him. Next is a solar powered robot kit that can be configured about a dozen ways. Found a chemistry kit (not a toy ) made in Germany that will require more than a little supervision from me and maybe something his mom and dad will be better off not knowing about. HaHa. My wife has given up on me. Every time she looks in the closet there's another box.

Whatever you find, do it together. They will be grown in a blink of an eye. My three grandkids are totally different personalities. The twelve year old is into baseball and basketball. I put up a batting cage in the back and pitch to him whenever he wants which is often enough that my shoulder is never 100%. Right now it's hoops. The nine year old is the science guy and reads constantly. And we have a five year old girl that is going to be the creative one. My wife takes her to dance class because she loves it. She also draws and things like kaleidescopes fascinate her.

I can't tell you how blessed we are to be able to do these things for them.

Here's hoping your in-laws see the value in something like the Kiwi Crates.

[Corky]

Happy Mole Day!

[DZ]

Happy Mole Day!

Awesome.

I have a question, though.

Are we celebrating the animal "mole."

Or are we celebrating the Mexican sauce "mole"?

It's our science thread. We like data.

Help us out.

[Markburn1]

Happy Mole Day!

Okay. I couldn't stand it. So I looked it up.

https://dayfinders.com/mole-day/

Chemistry fans are just as weird as physics fans.
What do you get when you have a bunch of moles acting like idiots? A bunch of Moleasses

[DZ]

Okay. I couldn't stand it. So I looked it up.

https://dayfinders.com/mole-day/

Chemistry fans are just as weird as physics fans.
What do you get when you have a bunch of moles acting like idiots? A bunch of Moleasses

Embarrassed.

It's the science thread.

I have a bachelor's in science.

I took Chem 101/102, and Organic 301-302

It never occurred to me he was referring to moles in chemistry.

Sigh.

[DZ]

Irresistible.

I cannot stop thinking about what scientists call "The Hard Problem," where consciousness arises from.

I find the idea of "consciousness" being fundamental to the universe and living things simply tap into it, absolutely irresistible.

If feeds spirituality, and I like when science can shed some fundamentalism and embrace bigger pictures.

Like everything else, I'm lucky to understand only a third of this, but it's a fascinating 1/3rd.

[Markburn1]

Irresistible.

I cannot stop thinking about what scientists call "The Hard Problem," where consciousness arises from.

I find the idea of "consciousness" being fundamental to the universe and living things simply tap into it, absolutely irresistible.

If feeds spirituality, and I like when science can shed some fundamentalism and embrace bigger pictures.

Like everything else, I'm lucky to understand only a third of this, but it's a fascinating 1/3rd.

Looking forward to this. Maybe tonight I'll have time.

[Markburn1]

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-G...xperiment.html

Are we doomed? I don't think so, but....

I can't get the article to let me copy and paste excerpts, but the speculation is fascinating. In one scenario it describes a black hole created by CERN to reduce the size of the earth to 300 feet across or eat up the planet from the inside out.

[kitzbuel]

We have been getting hammered by thunderstorms every night this week. Lots of lightning, not much stargazing.


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[Jazzgirl_127]

We have been getting hammered by thunderstorms every night this week. Lots of lightning, not much stargazing.


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We have too! Usually in the evening and then early morning we've had to jump out of bed, stumble around and take the fans out of the windows. We usually get a 20 second heads up between "it started to rain" and "water is pouring out of the sky like Niagara Falls," it's been...fun.

[DZ]

The star cluster closest to Earth is in its death throes
Stars in the Hyades are moving so fast it will disintegrate in 30 million years

Using the Gaia spacecraft to measure velocities of stars in the Hyades cluster and those escaping from it, researchers have predicted the cluster’s demise. “We find that there’s only something like 30 million years left for the cluster to lose its mass completely,” says Semyeong Oh, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge.

“Compared to the Hyades’ age, that’s very short,” she says. The star cluster, just 150 light-years away and visible to the naked eye in the constellation Taurus, formed about 680 million years ago from a large cloud of gas and dust in the Milky Way.

Stellar gatherings such as the Hyades, known as open star clusters, are born with hundreds or thousands of stars that are held close to one another by their mutual gravitational pull. But numerous forces try to tear them apart: Supernova explosions from the most massive stars eject material that had been binding the cluster together; large clouds of gas pass near the cluster and yank stars out of it; the stars themselves interact with one another and jettison the least massive ones; and the gravitational pull of the whole Milky Way galaxy lures stars away too. As a result, open star clusters rarely reach their billionth birthday.

"Death throes" means thirty million years in astronomy. We simply can't relate. Whatever is around on Earth then, it won't be humans (probably cyborgs) humans have evolved from some kind of tree thing in 30 million years. Whatever may be around as an ancestor will be far more evolved, probably have far bigger brain and eyes, more lean healthy muscle, maybe two hearts. But scientists are starting to think that the next "human" evolution is inevitably to a more bio-silicon networked interface.

It terrifies some, some think it's just not that big a deal, they'll have emotion, ethics, all that, if infused with consciousness.

But that's what happens over what scientists call "deep time" - the lengths we can't wrap our minds around.

[DZ]

Ancient DNA suggests Vikings may have been plagued by smallpox

Seems timely: Forget going to the moon, smashing atoms, or sequencing genes, when smallpox was eradicated from the globe it was considered the greatest human scientific achievement. Perhaps anti-biotics now replaced it at the top. But we still can't kill viruses like we can bacteria.

Researchers collected DNA from viruses in the remains of northern Europeans living during the Viking Age, some of whom were likely Vikings themselves, and found that they were infected with extinct but related versions of the variola virus that causes smallpox, the team reports in the July 24 Science. The new finding pushes back the proven record of smallpox infecting people by almost 1,000 years, to the year 603.

Researchers had previously discovered ancient traces of variola virus DNA in a mummy from the mid-1600s, which put the common origin of modern strains in the 16th or 17th century (SN: 12/8/16).

It is still uncertain when the virus that causes smallpox first began to infect people. The disease is estimated to have killed as many as 500 million people and is the only human pathogen to have been eradicated globally.

[DZ]

Would it be morally wrong to bring back extinct species, or the right thing to do? Personally, we probably should focus on not extinguishing the ones we got.

Discover Magazine:

Would you like to see a real, live wooly mammoth? Or how about a Tasmanian tiger in the flesh? Scientists have already finagled a few ways to resurrect extinct species from their evolutionary graves. Even muckier than the scientific methods themselves, though, are the social, ethical and legal ramifications of so-called de-extinction.

In Science today, two Stanford researchers tackle this tricky topic to parse out exactly what we have to gain and lose from de-extinction technologies. Using the passenger pigeon as a thought experiment, another paper in the same issue looks at the fears and excitement of leaders in the field of genomics.

There are three main ways of bringing back extinct species, according to the Stanford researchers: backbreeding, genetic engineering, and cloning. With backbreeding, scientists use a living species that is genetically similar to the extinct species, and selectively breed it for the traits of the now-extinct species. Genetic engineering depends on existing DNA samples of the extinct species; scientists could bring them back to life by targeting and replacing specific genomic sequences in a closely-related living species. Finally, if viable cell nuclei from the extinct species are available, it can be cloned using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer — a tested but as-of-yet unsuccessful method for extinct species.

Do these scientists not go to movies anymore?