“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.”
“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a broken protein.”
“[T]he developers are testing it on Annie, Zach Adams' wife. After a failed attempt with an earlier version, the latest tutorial took Annie far enough to where she could ‘tunnel under a bog and drown her fortress.’ Presumably, that is good.”
“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.
“GISAID, a global database of influenza virus genetic sequences that typically gets thousands of flu sequences each year, has not received a single B/Yamagata sequence with specimen collection data after March 2020.”
“Cosmic strings appear to be a generic prediction of our (admittedly fuzzy) understanding of the early Universe. We may not know exactly what went down all those billions of years ago, but we’re fairly certain that it involved phase transitions and that those phase transitions should support the existence of topological defects like cosmic strings.”
“The fact that Tebo 1 apparently didn’t face serious infection suggests that whoever performed the amputation understood how to keep the wound, the surgical tools, and their hands clean and understood that they needed to do so (which puts 31,000-year-old hunter-gatherers ahead of European and American surgeons just a century ago).”
“[A]dding soft tissue pads into the models substantially reduced the overall stress and strain on the pedal bones across all five species, similar to the cushioning pads of today’s elephants and rhinoceroses.”
“[Betelgeuse’s] trademark pulsation has also stopped—hopefully temporarily—perhaps because the interior convection cells ‘are sloshing around like an imbalanced washing machine tub’ as the photosphere begins the slow process of rebuilding itself.”
“[T]he cases may arise from a co-infection of two different viruses—one of which could be an adenovirus and the other a hitchhiking virus—in children who also happen to have a specific genetic predisposition to hepatitis.”
“[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).”