swansont

Which one?

“To grow these copper-toothed stomach jaws, which last through the worms’ entire five-year lifespan, bloodworms harvest the metal from marine sediments on the seafloor. Then, through a previously unknown chemical reaction, the worms fuse the copper to their jaws.” https://www.livescience.com/bloodworms-fangs-origins

I think situations like this are part of the reason communities are able to defeat efforts to put large data centers nearby, since they use resources subject to public approval. If utility rates are going to jump, people show up to the public hearings and voice their displeasure. Some politicians will see that they’ll get voted out of office if they contradict strong public opinion.

That assumes an elderly person keeps the phone on them, or remembers to grab it when they get up. And remembers to charge it. Seems to me there’s a significant chance of getting repeated alerts from a forgetful senior.

The people who wrote the Bible didn’t know stars were objects at different and considerable distances.

And you should know that what you think doesn’t matter. It’s what you can show with empirical evidence and testable models. As far as the summary of me goes, I give it a barely passing grade for gathering data and a failing grade for applying analysis to it. Not surprising, because it doesn’t think

“Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it’s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform their hive-mates about food source locations.” https://kottke.org/26/01/an-optical-compass-inspired-by-bee-vision 10.5 min video in link discusses polarization and why the sky gives us polarized light, and then gets into making an optical compass using this. It finishes up with how bees use this and the waggle dance they use to tell the hive where food is.

“At 710 meters (2,297 feet), the asteroid is more than twice the length of the Eiffel Tower and spins on its axis once every 1.88 minutes. 2025 MN45 is one of thousands of asteroids recently identified by scientists at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory using the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera — the largest digital camera ever built. Nineteen were categorized as being either super or ultra-fast-rotating. That means a spin time of less than 2.2 hours or 5 minutes, respectively. The findings have now been reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.” https://www.discovermagazine.com/fastest-spinning-asteroid-ever-found-spotted-by-vera-c-rubin-observatory-48532

Looking at the average bill is not particularly informative; it’s going to vary by location in the US owing to the different climates we can experience, it fluctuates over the course of the year, and it depends on how you heat your home, as Cap’n pointed out. She hasn’t even hit the coldest part of winter, though this past December where I am in NY was colder than average, so it likely was for her, too. Also, the article says “energy bill” not “electricity bill” and that “the gas is still off” so the large bill may indeed be (in part) because she’s using resistive heat now According to a few analyses, resistive heating is somewhere around 2.5 - 3x more expensive than gas, (~4x in this one https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/true-cost-of-energy-comparisons-apples-to-apples.html ) so having the bill jump up because of that doesn’t seem so surprising. It doesn’t excuse the reporting for not detailing that and painting it as a rate hike.

And apartments are relatively cheap, since you have neighbors and a corridor, so you’re basically not losing heat to anyone adjoining you.

I researched this recently following a claim that housing costs are no less affordable than they were the past couple of generations, and while costs have risen it’s largely due to the size of new houses going up. Avg size of 1500 sq ft in in 1970 vs ~2500 square feet 40-50 years later

Thanks; unfortunately the “reporting” gives nothing in terms of actual detail. The bill tripled, but nothing about why. Did the rates change? Did the usage go up? Was it something administrative thing? (there are programs that “smooth out” your bills so you don’t pay so much in the high-use months - did that end, and the whole thing come due?) Unfortunately it looks like it could be using an outlier and presenting it as typical, which is an intellectually dishonest tactic.

In upstate NY, my base rate for electricity is about $0.17 per kwh. With taxes and other charges it comes to about $0.25 per kwh I use less than 1000 kwh per month; that’s highest in winter when I use a space heater in one room that’s colder.

Highly dependent on their circumstances. Do they say where they are, how big the house is, and what the electricity is being used for (e.g. do they have electric heat) and how many kwh? Article is paywalled.

What’s the physical significance of 53?

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No matter how many times you divide by 2, you will never reach 0 Do you have any numerical example of applying this to an actual, physical situation, such that it can be tested?

You can tell the direction that the high energy particles are coming from. Not the sun.

Most of the episode summaries on IMDB tell you where they are and how old the meteorites are. There’s probably information about how they know the age and more details if you search on the name of each meteorite field.

They’ve announced that all Americans should leave. Something that the WH brain trust was unable to anticipate a week ago. It’s almost like there was no plan, and that the people in charge are incompetent </sarcasm>

I’m less inclined to attribute this as a fault in an era where they simply didn’t know much (in this case, about atoms, nuclear structure and isotopes) - there was no valid existing theory behind most of what they were investigating. We know now you can change lead into gold but it’s not a chemical reaction and that you’d need a particle accelerator TIL they actually did it at the LHC https://home.cern/news/news/physics/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01501-5

Uplift and erosion exposes older sediments, so it’s not necessarily the case that the surface layer is young. Where were they doing this?

He took a similar approach with deportations. Sure, they might have been showing up for check-ins and following rules for asylum, but they were painted as bad people and that was what they focused on - a distraction from violating due process. Then it gets somewhat normalized. Now they’re shooting/murdering people, and lying about the circumstances Focusing on Maduro is a distraction from the violation of UN agreements and the US Constitution. But the lies continue, since that’s what they do.

I think it’s a good point to include poison in the discussion, because drugs are potential poisons, we just use them in nonlethal doses. Botox would be an example that clearly shows this. It’s the botulinum toxin, perhaps the deadliest natural substance we’ve discovered (nanograms per kg of target is a lethal dose if injected) but sufficiently diluted it’s used as a treatment for certain afflictions. It’s a matter of what it does, and whether that helps with some medical issue if you use the right dose and delivery method (injection vs inhalation vs oral intake generally have different lethal doses)

One aspect of people who prefer a simple explanation that’s wrong rather than a complex answer that’s right, especially in cases when it aligns with their worldview.