exchemist

Could it be a Rayleigh wave? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_wave

He was clearly that. But then so are many of the best educators. Often, however, these are not the best researchers. Feynman seems to have managed to combine both. But there was obviously quite a big ego at work.

But can't we reach the same conclusion about c being a speed limit just by considering limits? I'm no mathematician, but I understood the point about limits is you can see where a function is going without resorting to infinities.

Plenty of people publish papers who are not "renowned". He could have been a PhD student or something, or he could have simply left academia to do something other than research. Does it matter?

A microwave oven will not generate high temperatures in anhydrous silica gel.

This issue has now been adequately answered by several of us. You are becoming a bore.

No. I'm out of this now.

The point about lack of coherence is that your "arguments" are almost impossible to discern. And frankly, there is no reason why we should all make a superhuman effort, just for a random unknown person on the internet. So you need to get coherent somehow, either by yourself or with appropriate help, and maybe people will pay attention.

Yes, but the issue here is that it is not deception per se. It's more subtle than that. As I understand it, it is rewarding researchers that manage - whether by good science, luck or bending their findings - to get the sort of results the big man hopes for, to support his theory. And presumably by burying the careers of those unfortunate researchers that can't replicate the findings, or get positive results. In medicine in particular, there seems to be a culture of the big man: the eminent doctor or surgeon whom everyone wants to consult, whom everyone wants to study under and who has extensive powers of patronage. So, without any actual overt malpractice, a system can be created that is biased towards finding convenient rather than inconvenient results. And then the temptation to fabricate, to discard -ve data and so forth is there.

The thing about consciousness is a fairly widespread popular misunderstanding, often associated with quantum theory and sometimes, in egregiously ignorant or stupid cases, with relativity. But I won't go further, as your post is not very coherent.

If you are a member of the professional class, active and in work, you won’t see that much of the unhealthy portion of the population. Commuting to work in London, one notices how young and healthy many people are, compared with say a coastal English town that one might visit on holiday. In the US I suspect there is also a strong ethnic divide, with poor health prevalent among groups one meets fewer of. But I see they include as chronic disease anything that lasts over a year and requires treatment. That strikes me as very broad.

I also read that zinc coffins have been used in the USSR to repatriate the bodies of dead soldiers. True, but lugging around a supply of compressed hydrogen would be worse than water.

OK, I may have found the basis of this: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.1c02368 Translating the jargon into normal language, this is based on barium sulphate, which the authors say has a high band gap - which makes it non-absorptive, i.e. white, in the visible region of the spectrum, while having a "9μ phonon resonance", i.e. vibrational excitation of the crystal lattice, making it a good absorber and emitter in the infra red. In effect, this paint is white in the visible but "black" in the IR! Very clever. But no Maxwell's Demon. Thermodynamics continues to rule.

Something odd here. An efficient emitter of thermal radiation is a black body, not a white one. Do you have a link describing what they did in more detail? As for Maxwell’s Demon, no. The surface of the ground at night will often be cooler than the air, if there is no cloud cover. That’s because from a radiation point of view the ground is trying to get towards thermal equilibrium with space - which is very cold.

I knew it is advised not to store tomatoes in the fridge, but not why. Is this the reason, perhaps?

Where did you get this picture from?

OK I've found it now, near the end. Thanks.

I couldn’t see anything about sealed coffins in that description. Does it say that?

That was a story for kids. Anyone back in the 60s who knew any science realised the concept of a “radioactive spider” made no sense. In sci fi there is often a macguffin to enable the plot that is scientifically dodgy, (faster than light travel being perhaps the most obvious). But writers, even today, have a blind spot about radiation. I was appalled, in the 2019 TV dramatisation of the Chernobyl disaster, to see them claim the bodies of workers who died of radiation sickness had to be buried in sealed coffins, as if they had become radioactive as a result of exposure to radiation. That’s utter bullshit - but makes for suitably harrowing TV, with distraught relatives unable to say goodbye to loved ones etc etc. So they put it in, regardless. It appalled me as I think it irresponsible to perpetuate superstitious myths about the effects of radiation, among the general public. And especially in a drama documentary with pretensions to accuracy. It made me suspect there were other fictions in the series - as indeed there were.

The fat, which provides energy to the body, does so by being oxidised to water and CO2, just like carbohydrates, but involving a different reaction of course. The CO2 is exhaled through the lungs and the water is excreted via the usual processes.

OK. So someone had not thought it through, evidently. That happens a lot in some sci-fi, which is why people like me can find some of it rather irritating.

Yes the basic problem is that, while hydrogen is light, it is a gas that can't be liquefied under pressure (at normal temperatures), as it is above its critical temperature. So you have an intractable volume problem.

Are you asking about genes or about how an individual can lighten the colour of his or her hair? Your (1) and (2) suggest it is the latter. Re your (1), yes there are bleaching agents for hair that can lighten it. Re your (2), no, the opposite is the case. Sunlight will tend to lighten dark blonde hair. I have had two blonde girlfriends in the course of my life and the hair of both would become a few shades lighter in summertime, especially after a sunny holiday.

Here's a clue: what happens when a plant wilts, due to lack of water?

Checking who got cancer would not be enough. People get cancer anyway from a wide variety of causes, or just by bad luck. So you would need a sample population big enough to detect a statistically significantly higher rate of cancer than an equivalent population who had never been prescribed metronidazole and then correct that for any causes of cancer (such as recurrent helicobacter pylori infection) which might make the test population more susceptible to cancer than the controls. Not straight forward, it seems to me. But in any case from the links you provided there is no strong evidence of cancer from this drug as prescribed in human subjects. I quote from your second link: "A teratogenic effect of metronidazole could not be established (Koss et al. Reference Koss, Baras, Lane, Aubry, Marcus, Markowitz and Koumans2012), but it was found to be carcinogenic in rodents after extended durations of highly dosed treatment. In man, results were less clear and often conflicting (Dobiás et al. Reference Dobiás, Cerná, Rössner and Srám1994). With regard to short-term treatment with metronidazole, originally no correlation between metronidazole intake and cancer was found (Falagas et al. Reference Falagas, Walker, Jick, Ruthazer, Griffith and Snydman1998), but more recent studies report on a limited correlation (Friedman et al. Reference Friedman, Jiang, Udaltsova, Quesenberry, Cha and Habel2009). As a consequence, metronidazole is officially classified as ‘reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen’. There is a theoretical risk, no doubt, due to the results of the animal studies, but these involve vastly more intense and prolonged exposure to the drug than occurs in prescribing. It is fairly evident from the passage I have quoted that if there is an effect it cannot be marked. @CharonY describes the situation 2 posts above this one.