JoeSchmuckatelli

Scientists identify microbes responsible for | EurekAlert! ...Life is weird. If it can overcome the cold, perhaps it can eat the crud found on Titan.

Antimatter stars and other oddities from 2021: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencenews.org/article/science-discoveries-2021-big-if-true/amp Edit: also, this is cool: Five ways a pulsar duo sheds light on general relativity and more | Science News

Health and beauty products may be sold in the United States with the tag line, "the exact way _(product)_ works is not well known." One example: https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/gabapentin-nerve-pain-3557479/

From a Bread and Circuses standpoint, SX's philosophy makes for much better television.

Should littoral combat (read: massive amphibious landings against prepared defenses) be required again - there might be a need to bring the big boys back out of mothball, again. That would be about their only use, given the efficacy of anti-ship missiles these days. Even then, the ground would need to have been 'prepped' fairly well by air-power to enable the ships to get within range (modern missiles don't need LOS any more than 18" guns, but have considerably more range Anti ship missiles Thus, the shore batteries and mobile platforms would have necessarily been reduced, the offensive air capacity of the target eliminated and the Marines facing dug in forces with no ability to destroy the ships supporting them. I suspect, however, that before such an open-war, 'Top Tier' combatant conflict happens again that all of the satellites will have been destroyed and the world be on the brink of nuclear war. For another US vs Iraq scenario... maybe. But a US v China? My advice would be to buy a place in a very rural area and stock up.

I suspect the fear of earth microbes affecting Mars (et.al.) and vice versa is one of those 'overly cautious' things. NASA unveils new rules to protect the moon and Mars from Earth germs | Space At least at this point: there's too few and too little contact between Earth and other places for it to be likely. Basically a tiny community of source bacteria would have to find a ready and waiting environment that it could exploit, and where applicable, out-compete the already existing microbes to establish itself. I'm not sure that microbes on the surface of the earth have anything to worry about from microbes brought up from the lightless depths of our oceans (volcanic vents), much less from Mars (of course, should I be wrong in this assumption, bad things could happen... I get it). But drag pyrococcus furiousus up from the depths and scatter it about the land... and what you'll get is a bunch of poisoned microbes. My reading of panspermia's best guess is that massive amounts of seed material fell into the proto-earth and other planets likely in the form of cometary bombardment - where the dice were rolled often enough that atmospheric breakup allowed the biotics to rain down (without burning up) and find water. Those that could, survived then thrived. The 'chunk of Mars' hits Earth scenario could, possibly, bring microbes from one planet to another - but something evolved to survive Mars climate might find Earth microbes fairly aggressive and the environment not very welcoming. But that's the risk, isn't it? The Mars adapted microbes might be so freaking tough that once in the soft lands of Earth they out-compete whatever they find. Point of this ramble: I think we shouldn't be inordinately cautious about contaminating Mars - and only reasonably cautious about bringing stuff back here.

Couple of things: ships may not be more armored, but they are better laid out and have much better fire suppression than previously. CIWS is good - but there are advantages to dumb bombs =very small & relatively fast. With a dead in the water modern ship relying on CIWS exclusively... I'd hate to be on the modern ship. IIRC - these novels have a modern naval task force whipped back in time to the Battle of Midway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Choice Might be interesting

Which tells you that they're confident China is done blowing up payloads.

I've had to disassemble and clean a lot of weapons over the years, along the way being forced to learn the nomenclature and function of the various parts. One name that's always stuck with me (for its uniqueness) is the ogive plunger on the Mk-19. Now I know this is an engineering heavy group... But how often do you run into the 'ogive' in regular life? If you are unfamiliar with the word... All here should be familiar with the shape! I give you the ogive! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogive (it's the name for the shape of the nose cone)

SciAm has a really nice write up about this, with some fabulous pictures and diagrams. Cover story of the Jan 22 issue. Here's the Nature version: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84310-w (Antikythera Mechanism) Astounding that they were making geared mechanisms so complex 2,000 years ago! Edit: here's the video: https://vimeo.com/518734183

I really hope that this turns out to be merely a theoretical possibility, but that the universe 'chooses' to not allow it. Otherwise our decendant's food choices could be severely constrained.

More on Juno and Jupiter https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/19/juno-mission-ganymede/

Pluto's polygons https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/pluto-bizarre-polygon-science

Nothing so exciting. But we can say that it no longer worked as intended

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/politics/lithium-mining-energy-climate/index.html climate advocates and environmental groups against each other

March 25, 2003, a massive dust storm rolled through the Tigris and Euphrates watershed bringing a soaking rain. An infantry lieutenant whose nylon sleeping bag was soaked had the bright idea using the exhaust from my tank to dry his gear. ... 1500 degrees and nylon. Any guesses as to what happened?

Could just be a regional event. I've seen speculation that had the Dino killing asteroid that made Chicxulub Crater not hit the Gulf it was possible that it would not have been a world killer. Absent a mass extinction event, humans should survive... But if you have a mass extinction - the larger life forms usually don't make it.

The weak part of panspermia is that it remains purely speculative. Should we find microbes on Mars, Europa and elsewhere it might be argued to be factual. Then we need to find extra solar DNA bearing life and maybe it becomes the standard model

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/world/juno-jupiter-ganymede-flyby-scn/index.html

To add to what I suggest above, this is from that Cold War era Congressional report on Nuclear War scenarios I linked pages back:

Not exactly sure where to drop this, so I'm putting it here: Videos like this make me wish I was an aquatic archaeologist. Nautical archaeology is likely to find places people lived (given that we tend to like the littorals) way back when. Given the period of time he's talking about was pretty long, and population was small... Still, the best stone age sites are likely submerged today. For those who catch the temperatures of the interglacial period being higher than today: Eemian - Wikipedia (It was probably during this time that some of those land-locked coral reefs formed)

is freaking awesome!

What is the cladding for?

There is some thought vis panspermia that early Earth's ecosystem was populated by only extremophiles. That their adventures and waste created the environment that we currently enjoy. If there is merit to this - there could be extremophiles that could never evolve out of the state due to the inhospitable rest of Mars... And possibly that whatever extremophiles got a foothold went extinct for lack of a world wide ecosystem (islands of life trapped in shrinking isolated pools)

Remember that you eliminated most of the people from the city. Vast swathes of the US are rural. The trucking industry has survived because of the number of trucks between cities - but mass distribution centers are gone. Okay - not the truck industry... But the trucks. Now - think about Harvey and other hurricanes. The survivors actually help one another. So in places where it's easy to grow food - people survive. Desert farms dry up and whither. Still - more people survive than one might expect. If that happens you might expect a general collapse of the food web. Ever read Lucifer's Hammer?