DDE

That's actually a question I've also had. Would interstellar expeditions in a future where spaceflight is casual but sensors aren't stupidly good necessarily need probes? I've trended towards yes, but by gut feeling. If only to check if the planet and the entire system aren't made of antimatter

Which is why it's often suggested that Starship's goals fo not extend beyond LEO. Or even the First Island Chain.

Not sure on the reasoning behind these two. The second one might make some sense if you build infrastructure around the Martian moons or haul ice from the Belt.

Over the 1950s and the 1960s, the technical reliability of interstellar travel and the skill level of the pilots of the intergalactic community must have both increased dramatically. The 1950s were rife with reports of UFO crashes, with circa 30 instances in the US alone. Of those, only Roswell made it into the subsequent ufology canon, with saucers and "greys". The third UFO era, the golden age, saw a drastic shift from aliens in distress to alien abductions. Notably, aliens in distress were preceded by humans in distress. In the late XIXth century and mostly in America, the proliferation of the yellow press led to the forgotten first era of UFO sightings - that of airships crewed by fellow Americans, often of the mad scientist variety, by funny foreigners, or nudist Amazons (this last variant curiously made into a 1950s Brazilian alien abduction story... it is hardly a surprise the abducted farmer was returned sans pants). However, a lot of the tropes were already there - thr fliers of hovering cigar-shaped silver aircraft, often sweeping the ground with spotlights, were disembarking due to technical failure, and were not above marauding the local cattle for an impromptu barbecue. There were, indeed, reports of abductions and displacements of people on the ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship

I still balk at applying this to the whole generation because I just don't see it being this widespread and severe. I think there are two distinct problems. Yes, Gen Z is a bit more infantile - because this has been increasingly accommodated, and because the economic environment it grew up in precluded the usual pathways of transition to adulthood. They are like this because their attitude to life - the basement-dwelling virgin, if you wish - has worked and the "out of the parents' house by 20" does not. Not in this economy. And upon collision with reality they seem to more or less moderate their tendencies. Separate to this is the issue of political radicalization... but I seriously question if this is Gen Z's doing. The ranks of Internet radicals are full of late Gen Xers and millenials, and a minority of Gen Z are simply falling into an established lifestyle and profession of peddling a child's black-and-white thinking from the bully pulpit of expertise. Unfortunately there seems to be a market for people like this. The next logical question is why then aren't we already seeing the effects of their presence in politics... and I think we already do, at least in smaller states where "young, fresh faces" run the show without "adult" supervision. Irresponsibility, inability to see cause and effect, and complete disregard for anyone who is opposed to them - not just hatred, but disregard, the inability to even consider their counteractions - all run rampant. I would name names, but this would become a colossal dumpster fire.

Torpedo, amongst other things, used to be the term for a style of a car body. This term was chosen by Ivan Likhachev of the Stalin Plant (ZiS), later Likhachev Plant (ZiL), for its sports club. Eventually the name would spread throughout the Soviet Union and, I kid you not, there's an FC Torpedo Bristol out there, and it's not a coincidence. That's not important, though. What's important is that ZiL's vast territory in the meander of the river Moskva has been turned into a huge residential development, and Moscow's public transport strategy for such developments includes electric ferries where possible. Route 3 of such ferries just got announced, and it will cover that meander, including a pier/stop titled "Torpedo" after the football club. Which means that (low) thousands of people, every day, will be hearing the announcement "Next stop, Torpedo!"

Entire industries and fields of pseudoscience, from astrology to life coaching, work towards convincing them that one is not.

Rakthamichthys rongsaw is a fish. Not only that, subterranean swamp eels have separately evolved on three continents.

Their parents and class expectations do. And abandoning all sense of personal responsibility in favour of blaming society at large is in the vogue these days. Talk about voluntarily becoming a cog in the machine...

Hypomagnetic environments and their effects in living organisms. It seems that the lack of a planetary magnetic field may have more immediate and rather drastic effects on living organisms at both cellular and cognitive levels. Severe malformities in embryos, cardiovascular changes and impaired memory in humans, and in one IMBP experiment, the rats going utterly berserk at each other, were all reported. However, most of what's being done on the topic seems to come from Trukhanov et al at IMBP, and a few Chinese papers. And using Atomic Rockets as a representative sample of Anglophone space enthusiasts, this issue does not seem to be on their radar much. Am I wrong?

I think they may fall into a trap very familiar to me - lazy doodling masquerading as 'continuous worldbuilding'. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but one should not masquerade it (especially to themselves) as something it's not.

Credibility? Either way, AFAIK Book 1 of "Rockets and People" contains the line to the effect of "When the scientific report began with an extended Marx quote, we knew things would go downhill quickly".

In spring of 1876, Friedrich Engels tried writing an essay verbosely but accurately titled "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man", but never finished it. It forms the part of the Communist Grand Dialectical Theory of Everything - i.e. it posits apes became humans through labour, and that capitalism bad, of course. Because Engels was far from a polymath, he ended up using the slightly obsolete paleontological theories of Ernst Haeckel as the jumping point for his elucidations. In short, he wrote that modern humans had evolved on Lemuria. You know, the lost continent between India and Madagascar, briefly posited by Haeckel due to apparent similarity between lemurs and small primates and the misinterpreted geological evidence of Gondwana (from a couple hundred million years earlier), which eventually entered the esoteric canon thanks to Elena Blavatskaya. It's a forgivable mistake, were it not for one thing: this sort of off-handed takes were enshrined as the absolute canon of science in the Soviet Union. For example, Engels's claim that the Mayans were at the "barbarian" stage of the Communist grand unified theory of history, combined with his claim that syllabi-based writing systems are only possible under the later "tech level" of a 'slave-owning regime', meant that Knorozov (from a couple of posts above) was quite worried that he would be arrested for ideological deviance upon publication of his decryption of Mayan syllabary. The Soviets thus very narrowly avoided having to constantly "debunk" Western research on plate tectonics and the like, looking like absolute fools who repeated the wild fantasies of New Age hippies and the Thule Society (yes, both got their mythology from Blavatskaya). One could only imagine the ensuing mental gymnastics - especially when looking back on how the Soviets pretended Darwin was a supporter of Lamarckism, and renamed mainstream, genetics-driven Darwinism into Weissmanism-Morganism.

So the Broken Arrow devs decided to celebrate April Fools with a spoof post about a few new units. Although they start a bit mildly, they quickly go nuts. How nuts? However, here's their idea of 'starting tame': That's a humvee with a BMP-1 turret slapped on to. So... uhm... guys... here's the thing...

My dad accidentally stole my phone yesterday. Those were very unfun 15 minutes. Subsistence agriculture. Gold. Political independence. No, I don't think it's a good analogy.

In case of glass wool exposure, the washdown must be done with cold water because otherwise the particles may enter the open pores. That's exactly the same advice as with radioactive contamination.

No, that one's exceptionally grumpy even for us.

Yuri Knorozov, the decryptor of the Maian glyphs, wrote the cat in the photograph as the coauthor of the article "On the matter of classifying signals". This wasn't even a joke - he was analyzing, amongst other things, her meowing to her kittens.

So why do you have to posit a non-existent material when you're just describing something akin to a Joffe trap that is entirely physics-compliant?

It was considered an anti-launchpad frag feature, AFAIK.

It lasted for a few seconds longer, but then it did am eerily precise reenactment of the 2007 Proton-M crash, so...

Or an upside-down accelerometer

Apparently, this is how the Interbellum French arrived upon the delta wing independently from Lippisch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payen_Pa.101

I learnt of this quite belatedly, and I'll admit to have known nothing about it, or having no relationship to it. James Harrison, OAM, of New South Wales, Australia, died February 17 in his sleep. Between 1954 and his forced 'retirement' in 2018, he made 1,173 blood plasma donations, which, due to his specific antibody composition, were used to save over 2,500,000 newborns, including his own grandson and great-grandchildren, from death due to rhesus factor incompatibility.