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I've never heard of this incident Stringy. The Lightning was a 'rocket with a saddle', and while it had a rather cramped 'office' by American standards, it did use the excellent Martin-Baker Mk.4 ejection seat. I have heard of a vertical ejection where the pilot broke his legs on landing. Take a look at the picture ... The dramatic story of a nose-diving plane as pilot escaped death by seconds in Hatfield - HertsLive (hertfordshiremercury.co.uk)

Wars without human casualties tend to go on as long as money/resources last. My opinion on the matter was formed by an episode of Star Trek:TOS, 'A Taste of Armageddon'. Read the plot here A Taste of Armageddon - Wikipedia And I think it is the wrong direction to be heading. As for battleships, they have evolved. A small aircraft carrier can be as short as 600 ft, with a displacement of 15000 t, and in addition to cannon/missile armament, can field 8-12 L-M F-35B off a ski-ramp deck, for self defense. So who needs a battleship ? Here is a typical example Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi - Wikipedia

If you jump in and recreate the experiment, like a few dozen labs did, you either confirm or refute the experiment, and your reputation isn't really on the line. I don't think anyone remembers any names other than Pons and Fleischmann. Similar with theory. There were people who leapt in with theoretical explanations of superluminal neutrinos (which may be a good example to contrast with cold fusion). Did they suffer any harm to their reputation? Probably not, because they didn't go public with their results, they went through the proper channels. I think perhaps being wrong isn't punished much as long as you do that. Or, conspiracy theorists even try and exploit physics. I don't think it's physics, per se, that owns the conspiracy; it's a rejection of mainstream physics that's involved. Perpetual motion has been around for a long time. Physics wants no part of it. As with my comment above, I think it didn't spawn this as much as gave it a new outlet to express itself. Like some other perpetual motion gambits, it's something an isolated crackpot can work on without being outrageously expensive.

And the next phase begins: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity runs/spins rotor blades motors for the first time On April 9, 2021 NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover sent images of Ingenuity Helicopter’s rotor blades spin up within motor test. Ingenuity is ready to make First Fly on Mars on April 11-12. Rotor blades spinned up and are unlocked and helicopter is going to make high-rpm test. So next milestone is to spin up rotor blades full-speed for the first time on Mars (to the planned flight speed of ~2400 RPM) while still on the surface. When Ingenuity is flying, it uses a lot of power-many hundreds of watts. The lithium-ion battery that powers Ingenuity's two main propulsion and six blade pitch control motors needs to handle power surges as Ingenuity flies and fights any winds and gusts it may encounter. The helicopter's voltage needs to be maintained so that motors do not stall or electronic devices get in trouble. Ingenuity comes out of the cold Martian night without much energy in its battery, so it needs to bask in the Sun to warm up and let the solar panel charge up the battery enough to handle the power demands of the day. All this means that Ingenuity cannot fly too early in the morning. Midday and afternoon are far better.

What the article does not touch on is that cold fusion has spawned a "zombie science" that continues to this day. If you google LENR (for low energy nuclear reaction), you will get pages of references to groups, self-published papers and even conferences that continue to tend the flame of Fleischmann and Pons, in the hope of limitless cheap energy. It seems impossible to kill this off - and I suppose we should not worry too much. Time will eventually do that if, as seems certain, there is nothing in the idea. But I find myself wondering if it was always like this with dead ends in science, or whether the internet somehow artificially prolongs the life of dud ideas nowadays. P.S. I enjoyed the mixed metaphor about the exploding or, rather, not exploding, goose. 😊

Don't expect too much from me... Ethics never was a main topic for me. I would say, as any sensible person, just the risk of giving capital punishment to an innocent should be reason enough to refrain from it. And AFAIK deterrence seldom works. So I think incarceration might be the best solution, in the first place simply because we put somebody away who has proven to be dangerous, in the second place we, i.e. society must attach consequences to people who do not want to play by the rules. However, if a society does not take the chance to rehabilitate the offender, it is not much use. Just putting somebody in jail, specially when it is overfilled, you create offenders and possibly more radical ones too. In this respect, it seems to me that there is a huge difference between prisons here in Europe, and in the USA. Most of the times rehabilitation is the aim. Therefore we might take some risks, letting out somebody who will still act criminally (which hurts extremely when its is murder on innocent people), but I think a lot more crimes are committed by ex-inmates who were radicalised by their life in prison. To get a glimpse of the difference between the USA and Scandinavia, there is a short series about 'the Norden'. This is the episode about prisons (the others are just as interesting): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfEsz812Q1I To get back at capital punishment: there are also examples of murderers who felt much remorse about their killing, and ended up meeting the family of the victim, or became meditators, even meditation teachers to their fellow inmates. These are pretty extreme examples of course, but just killing a criminal, or putting him/her in jail purely as punishment I find useless, and not something a civilised society should do. Punishment yes, but for the betterment of offender and society. A loose-loose is the last we want, no?

And then, very quickly, seek out a dockleaf. 😉

I would like to defer discussion of hydrogen bonding to another thread as it is taking us further and further off topic. The weakest standard bond my copy of Lange's Chemistry Handbook lists is the lithium - Lithium bond at 11 kcal/mol and the strongest hydrogen bond this modern article lists is the formic acid - flouride ion one at 48 kcal/mol (on page 22) https://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/7945/tdhg.pdf?sequence=3Girona But the important point I wanted to make was not the strength if the individual bond but the collective strength of many bonds applied to large molecular aggregates. Yes, most Science texts are expensive, especially working ones. To continue with the mechanical aspect here is some data to review. Don't worry about the forumale, just look at the daigrams and the text and get an idea of how any soil material is made up and behaves as it does mechanically. This will help enormously when we look particularly at clays. I have mentioned the Atterberg limits, but you did not answer my question or the one about vitrification so here are a couple of photos of how geologists and soils engineers test soild for plasticity. I'm sorry I don't have any more time tonight but will come back to it. So here is a website that explains clay from potter's viewpoint , including the subject of my other question - vitrification. https://thepotterywheel.com/types-of-clay-for-pottery/

Perhaps there is research in this space. I'm not entirely sure, but that's not why I answered the way I did. Your questions have logical answers. Density will tend to vary (even if only slightly) between Volume A and Volume B. Likewise with mass... extract two equally sized volumes of clay and check their mass, you will see variance (due to the lack of purity in the samples). Similar with electrostatic force... will be pretty close and similar, but depends entirely on the sample(s) being measured.