“[T]here’s the uncomfortable fact that producing the 2 megajoules of laser power that started the fusion reaction took about 300 megajoules of grid power, so the overall process is nowhere near the break-even point. … [W]e’re still left with major questions about whether laser-driven fusion can be optimized enough to be useful.”
“Matching the density of the two planets produces a model that has a bit over 10 percent of the planet’s mass composed of water. This, however, means that about half the planet’s volume is water. … Due to the planet’s mass, the pressure of the atmosphere would be immense and could create a layer of supercritical water between the atmosphere and the ocean.”
“[A] team of European researchers decided to model an event that should be relatively uncommon: the two black holes didn’t start out in a mutual orbit but happened to pass close enough to gravitationally latch onto each other. … The models that produced a chirp that best matched the GW190521 signal saw a single pass that drew the black holes closer, followed by a single rapid curve into the collision.”
“[T]he earliest image indicates that it was roughly 100,000 Kelvin, which suggests we were looking at it just six hours after it exploded. The latest lensed image shows that the debris had already cooled to 10,000 K over the eight days between the two different images.”
“Here, rare earth extraction cleared 90 percent efficiency, taking 67 hours to get there. By contrast, leaching didn’t max out until 130 hours after extraction started, and its maximum efficiency was only 60 percent. Again, the extraction that used electricity had fewer contaminating metals.”
“Knowing that these two impacts generated events allowed for a direct comparison between the estimates and the impact location. And it turns out the estimates are quite good. One event was estimated at 3,530 ± 360 km away, and it turned out to be 3,460 km from the lander, a difference of just 70 km.”
“Whenever COVID-19 cases doubled, climate-related tweets dropped by about 5 percent. The doubling of COVID-19 deaths saw climate tweeting decline by over 7 percent. … [A] big boost in case counts could easily offset the arrival of a major hurricane.”
“If we assume there’s a ring produced every orbit, the 17 present rings indicate about 130 years of ring production. Since they now extend out about a light-year, we can infer that they’re moving away from the binary stars at about 2,600 kilometers every second.”
“Before DART, Dimorphos’ orbit took 11 hours and 55 minutes; post-impact, it’s down to 11 hours and 23 minutes. … NASA estimates that the orbit is now ‘tens of meters’ closer to Didymos.”
“There are some who take organic chemistry to get into a Ph.D. program or prepare for a career in chemistry, but they’re relatively rare. Most of the students are pre-med, and for a lot of them, organic chemistry is a dream-shattering experience.”
It seems to me like the professor at the center of this story was done a grave disservice by NYU, set up to fail (though surely not intentionally on anybody’s part) and then abandoned.
“[T]he ancient wolf genomes clustered together in time. That is, a given wolf was most likely to be closely related to other wolves alive at around the same time, no matter where those wolves lived on the planet.”
“Sauropods got considerably more massive than even the biggest harvesters — they may have approached 80,000 kg. Their weight was spread across only four limbs, with footprints roughly comparable to those of modern tires (harvesters, in contrast, often have six tires).”
“For papers that bomb, there was no difference; women and men ended up on papers with zero citations at equal rates. But for a reasonably successful paper (one that gets cited 25 times), women are about 20 percent less likely than men to end up on the author list.”
“[I]n this case, the unseen companion was producing copious amounts of radiation that was heating the star. This process essentially produces a star with a ‘daytime’ side bathed in radiation, so it’s more energetic and brighter, and a ‘nighttime’ side that emits the star’s intrinsic brightness.”
“If you do a meta-analysis of all the publications resulting from trials that weren’t preregistered, homeopathic treatments outperformed placebo by a statistically significant margin. If you look at the publications that resulted from trials that had been preregistered, there was no statistical difference between homeopathy and placebo.”