cantab

Personally I'm inclined to say no, not in the normal sense of "element", because it isn't involved in chemical processes.

Well a neutron star collision is an even more neutron-rich event. Anyway I still find it hard to imagine that these kinds of highly-energetic natural phenomena would be unable to synthesise a stable superheavy element.

In the video I saw they said it was basically an air conditioning system. I guess that with the sun beating down, the interior of the fairing would get too hot for the payload's like.

... is in the back of a Delorean. The building is a pop tart factory ...

Zancle

On Earth the highest element found naturally in significant abundance is Uranium, atomic number 92. The mainstream view is that isotopes in the "island of stability" might have half lives of milliseconds or seconds, rather than microseconds or nanoseconds. There's a minority view that they could be stable over "human timescales" - hours, days, maybe even a few years. But I don't think anyone seriously reckons they could be stable over geological timescales. The problem I see, if these elements are stable over even hours, why have we not seen them in spectra of supernovae? In our labs on Earth superheavy elements are hard to make because it's hard to get enough neutrons, because the higher the atomic number the higher the neutron:proton ratio so adding two stable light elements doesn't give the most stable isotope of a superheavy. But supernovae - some of them at least - are very neutron-rich environments, I'm thinking it ought not to be a problem. Ignoring radioactive instability, various figures have been given for the "end of the periodic table", but the most current one is around atomic number 173. Beyond that the electron orbitals around the nucleus misbehave and it's thought that even if the nucleus was stable, it could not form a neutral atom.

Newcastle-under-Lyme

Oswestry

Yeah, mass budget seems like the big one. I also think there's limited need. We have various instruments to determine surface composition without needing to hit it with a missile.

Because one of them was an undercover cop, you get three stars and the taxi is pursued by the police sports cars and helicopter.

Merseyside

Yes, but. They fit, but there are a few horror stories of older heatsink designs damaging the more fragile socket 1151 processors. I would check on the cooler manufacturer's website, if they list LGA 1151 support it should be OK. Give you two, three, or four sticks of identical RAM, with assurance that they will work properly together. Multi-channel memory setups gives a small performance boost, though I think the LGA 1151 processors just do dual or single channel. The colours are WD's performance brands. Blue is 'standard', Black is 'high performance'. There are other colours marketed for other uses. But whether there are any actual performance differences between those two drives I don't know.

Good to see a safe launch and ExoMars almost on its way now. ESA don't really have the same quality of coverage SpaceX and NASA do though. I want telemetry dang it! A few neat things I caught from this morning's video. The brief clip of the assembly was cool, I saw how careful and delicate even a simple operation like fitting the fairing is. It's something games like KSP don't really convey - for us it's just design, click, launch. Also they mentioned - and we saw in the video - that the rocket is "free standing". I don't know if it has any physical link to the ground, but it's certainly a far cry from the complex clamp and support systems we see on many other launchers. I wonder why the Russians chose that approach - is it related to Proton's conception as an ICBM?

Based on current performance the 970 and 390 are pretty much equal. If you want to game on Linux pick the 970 because AMD's Linux drivers are hopeless. Otherwise pick the company you prefer - chances are you have your own previous good or bad experiences of nVidia and AMD. If you really can't decide, flip a coin - IMHO it really makes no difference. Or buy whatever you find a bargain on.

It's there when (if?) space launch becomes common enough. We're way off that now, and probably Skylon itself won't get us there, but I hope it gets that way before I die. Space hotels, Moon colonies, all the cool stuff we were imagining in the 1960s.

Because they don't have the exact same parts! The marketing departments at Intel, AMD, and nVidia will freely give similar brand names and model numbers to some very different components in laptops and desktops. For example a GTX 960M is a significantly weaker graphics chip than a GTX 960, in fact the 960M is very similar to the desktop 750 Ti. So you need to do your research to know what performance a laptop will actually get.

Icirrus

To clarify, I'm not saying there aren't good laptops. I'm just saying that for example a gaming laptop with a Core i5-6300HQ and a GTX 960M will not even be close in performance to a desktop with a Core i5-6500 and a GTX 960.

According to www.steamprices.com, on Steam KSP is indeed considerably cheaper in Russia - the equivalent of about £6 or $9. It's the same way for a lot of games, mainly down to the weakening of the rouble and game publishers not yet adjusting their Russian prices. Of course Valve don't want gamers in other countries taking advantage, and put various obstacles in the way. I don't know if KSP itself has any relevant licensing or technical restrictions though.

Possibly, if an American organisation ends up building Skylon. Which I think is quite likely actually, because (UK) Politics. Then again, a runway at the European space port in French Guiana would let it take more payload to orbit. In the short term, indeed Skylon only really needs one launch facility. But I'd say that if we get any sort of Really Cheap Launch Method, then a choice of launch sites starts to become important because the logistics of shipping payloads to the site becomes relevant in cost and time.

No, by definition of "planet". If the equatorial surface speed is equal to or greater than the orbital speed at that height then I believe the object will not be in hydrostatic equilibrium. Now a small body, held together by its own rigidity, could indeed spin that fast. I wonder what craters in the equatorial region would look like?

Who cares about feeding habits? I soak the sponges and load them into a giant catapult to win the water fight.

Greenwich

I return fire with United Flingdom. Centrifugal all the way

On the contrary, Skylon's planned weight is considerably lighter than the A380. It's the undercarriage design on Skylon that puts higher loads on each wheel therefore demanding the special runway. That's not a huge drawback I'd say, considering rockets need specialised infrastructure too. It's also plausible that different wheel arrangements could permit use of other runways. I expect that much like the Space Shuttle, Skylon would have various alternate landing sites. They would need to have a long enough runway, and also have the liquid hydrogen fuelling infrastructure put in place or capable or arriving to support the ferry flight back to base afterwards.