Science News Thread (for articles that don't relate to ongoing discussions)

[darthgently]

5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Funny thing is that I want to do it because I got asked about Aliens the Pyramids and Stonehenge. 

There is some evidence that the smooth facing stones on the pyramids at Giza (of which few remain) may have been cast in place from a sort of concrete, not carved, I gather, but I haven't done a dive on it yet to see how well the evidence holds up

Edited April 16 by darthgently

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

ay have been cast in place

That is a new one.  At least to me. 

I'll look into it. 

I remember shows from the 80s where they demonstrated possible technology including the use of logs, ropes, people and animals.  All very advanced! 

Here's a newer one 

 

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

That is a new one.  At least to me. 

I'll look into it. 

I remember shows from the 80s where they demonstrated possible technology including the use of logs, ropes, people and animals.  All very advanced! 

Here's a newer one 

 

First stab at a dive:

https://search.brave.com/search?q=giza+facing+stones+concrete

 

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, darthgently said:

There is some evidence that the smooth facing stones on the pyramids at Giza (of which few remain) may have been cast in place from a sort of concrete, not carved, I gather, but I haven't done a dive on it yet to see how well the evidence holds up

The famous cyclopic stone wall of Machu Picchu after "thousand years" and  one heavy rain.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/580

Spoiler

 

And thousands of other photos and videos of the "ancient" temples and statues, cracked or being destroyed by IS in Mesopotamia.

Casted concrete as "stones", steel or cast iron rebar (from the Bronze Age, yeah) inside the "stones", huge monoliths hanging in air definitely without any support (except an invisible rebar), iron rebar and disks inside the "Ancient Egyptian" and "Ancient Greek" columns, booted junk inside the "stones", pictures and paintings of XVI...XIX great artists who definitely hadn't seen real "Ancient Egyptian" pyramids, temples, and paintings.

Old pictures of giant Stonehenge in wild mountains, while the real one is small, situates on a bare meadowland, and was an artillery range in mid-XX.
Myriads of "ancient" photo-realistic statues, being found one-by-one in a kitchen-garden.

All significant temples, castles, cathedrals, intensively rebuilt since XVI, and especially in XIX.
Cologne Cathedral of XII... Wait... Being a semi-built something without towers on the early XIX photos, built in late XIX.

The Sphinx, depictied as a head on a standalone block by the XIX artists, a set of four standalone blocks of stones and construction junk on the late XIX photo, and becoming a lion "made of monolith rock", with added limbs and tail, with the rear part reinforced with bricks.

Many, many other "ancient ruins" of the "antique civilisations".

Pompeii and Herculanum, officially (even on the silver memorial table) buried by Vesuvius eruption in 1631, and unburied several decades later as an ancient Roman town, described by Tacitus.

Wait, but how we do know about the Tacitus itself? A miracle! Nobody else, by famous Petrarca had occasionally found his manuscripts in the derelict monastery. What a coincidence. What a pity, the manuscript itself and Petrarca's translation are lost, only printed version exists.

Where do we know about Sparta and its weird sadistic (but actually true stupid and unreaslistic for long time) macho rituals? From Pausanias. And where do we know from about Pausanias? From the XV printed version of (guess, what? yes, lost) his manuscript. A strange fact, it was the epoch of "utopic socialism" fantasies of all kinds, and Sparta looks exactly like another one of them, just with strong homosadistic background. Usually they just blow somebody with powder, or something like that, and divide the ideal city populations in stratas of "damoiselles", "mesdamoiselles", "damoisels", and so on. Probably written for the local Blue Oyster club, or so, but popularized for the sake of military inspiration.

Easter Island with its statues, never painted correctly until early XX, and mentioned as "I wished so much to see them, but had seen nothing" by Miklouho-Maclay, the famous daredevil scientist and traveller.

Famous Otto von Guericke (XVII), and his experiments with primitive electrostatic generators and primitive vacuum pumps.
Coincidentally same as Thales of Miletus and Hero of Alexandria. What a pity, we don't know the century of their lives (from V BC to III AD, iirc).
Did they even exist?

Triremes made of thin planks (when they even didn't have steel saws, thin and flexible, with teeth looking aside), no one of which was ever found.
Wait... One was. In Italy. But lost in fire under bombs, what a pity.

***

Everything before XV looks like a belles-lettres, and theatric scenery. Probably is.

The super-duper cyclopic stones recipe: gather expendable humans (peasants and prisoners), make them carry baskets.
You need:
lime (made of limestone, easily crashable even without tools, with another piece of limestone, if the labour force is not what you care about; if no limestone, just burn the bones of eaten cattle)
milled beautiful stone (granite, sandstone, marble, whatever else, you want to make the result look like);
sand;
water;
organic component (any glue from boiled butchery junk, fish, etc; dead labourers are also good enough; for artifical marble they use cheese);

Mix, then put an empty bag made of straw to the wall (it will decay after several years without traces), and start filling it with layers of the wet concrete, letting it harden.
To make its front and side faces flat use bended metal (copper, lead, aluminium) sheets. Don't forget to pull them out, otherwise you get those aluminium sheets between the ancient egyptian stones.

If you want a curvy hole through the stone monolith, put a rope soekd with gypsum, let them get solid, they pull the rope away.
Bingo, you have a stone with a hole made by magic worm, exactly like King Solomon did it.

The same with sword-in-stone or ironhook-in-stone.-

Or pour it into a clay form, made from wax model of the human model.
(Why, do you think, the antique statues are always shaved and have small man parts? The wax melting point is 60 C hot, then you have to cool down to let the wax get solid, and finally, if you haven't shaved, a sudden depilation happens. The models were hardly able to see the sculptor without panic.)

***

Now imagine that you are, say, Rodrigo Borgia aka Pope Alexander VI.
(Taken just as an example, being known for his soft humour and kind jokes, often lethal for the opponents.)

The museum overseer has brought a wooden-microlith German sword (can't find the photo, looks exactly like the "Ancient Greek xyphos").
You have two cubic metres of bronze, i.e. ~16 t.

"What else ancient to make? Another big bronze statue? Too trivial. A fountain? Too much water is needed. Stop, an idea."

You call the head artist and give him the wooden-stone sword and the bronze.
"It's autumn now. I want 10 000 of them in bronze by the spring. And use your imagination, let them be different and old".

Now you are the artist.
You go to the museum, take several strange-looking tools, like khopesh and so on.
A sword weights 1.5 kg. You need 10 000 of them

You make a clay form for several swords, and all winter long the workshop is melting bronze and casting swords. Boys are breaking and scratching the, put into vinegar, to make them old.

By the winter the 10 000 swords sre ready.

Now you're again Borgia.

You call 10 archbishops and tell them: "Dear comrades, the Party wants you to distribute 1 000 swords everyone".

Every archbishop returns to his residence and calls 10 bishops. "Comrades, the Party wants you to take a hundred of swords and distribute in your region."

Every bishop calls 10 abbots and orders them to take and bury ten swords.

Every abbot call several priests, gives to each a bronze sword and says "Hide it somewhere".
Then he calls the obedientiary, gives him other swords and tells the same.

The obedientiary hides one between wine barrels, buries another one under a tree, goes to the inn and sells the rest to the locally known thief, who sells them to the people who pay for them.

Next year the whole Europe is full of ancient xyphoses and khopeshes, in amounts, about which the Agamemnon and Tutankhamen could only dream, because where should they take 15 t of good bronze...

Edited April 16 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

Its lots of reconstruction of ancient sites, sometime just to protect them from weather but more important prestige and make them better tourist destination, this has happened for hundreds of years now. 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 hours ago, darthgently said:

First stab at a dive:

The MIT article is interesting - they talk about how... difficult... it is to get funding/be taken seriously when trying to explore that theory, then point out that it's not so loopy after all.  The concrete, if true, would be poured with a jello like consistency that for *reasons* cures in a way that avoids shrinkage common to other concretes.

It's an interesting theory.

 

Back to moving logs with mechanical advantage - this one is interesting.  The use of the bipod is totally different.  With the rope at the top of the bipod and the fulcrum forward of the log, they just pull it up and over.

 

Side note - I got the funding to try this with my students.  So later next week I'll report back on how it went.  Using 2x4x10s, making some beams from 2x6x12s and a few other things.

Should be fun!

[StrandedonEarth]

Geez, it might have been back in the 80s or 90s (maybe later, but don’t think so) that I came across an article suggesting that the blocks that built the Pyramids were poured, based on inclusions like hair. But apparently the theory never gained traction at the time…

[AckSed]

That dark energy's a bit elusive and hard to track. I'd better use the BIG lens: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2024-04-03-slac-completes-construction-largest-digital-camera-ever-built-astronomy

Spoiler

 

[kerbiloid]

The Dark Matter ^(tm) is also invisible for optics.

[AckSed]

Well of course. Which is why this is designed to track subtle gravitational shifts from the norm in astronomical observations.

[magnemoe]

On 4/17/2024 at 12:30 AM, StrandedonEarth said:

Geez, it might have been back in the 80s or 90s (maybe later, but don’t think so) that I came across an article suggesting that the blocks that built the Pyramids were poured, based on inclusions like hair. But apparently the theory never gained traction at the time…

If they had concrete they would used it lots of places like the Romans did. If you find use of concrete in ancient Egypt its probably Roman one, remember Cleopatra lived closer to our time than the construction of the pyramids. 

The interior blocks are pretty rough cuts, only the top and bottom needed to be flat for stability.  The outer layer would likely to be stone anyway, this was common in Rome and today for prestige buildings. 

Edited April 18 by magnemoe

[Codraroll]

4 hours ago, AckSed said:

That dark energy's a bit elusive and hard to track. I'd better use the BIG lens: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2024-04-03-slac-completes-construction-largest-digital-camera-ever-built-astronomy

  Hide contents

 

Looks slightly smaller than the type of lens paparazzi use to take pictures of various royal families on vacation from mountaintops ten kilometers away.

[kerbiloid]

13 hours ago, magnemoe said:

The interior blocks are pretty rough cuts, only the top and bottom needed to be flat for stability.

There are probably no interior blocks, they're a fantasy.

The whole thing is probably a ground hill above the rocky hill, covered with thin layer of quick-and-dirty "concrete" blocks, somewhere with photographed steel (sic! in so-called "Bronze Age") rebars and wires, somewhere with metal sheets stuck between the "stone" blocks.
That's why the "stone block" rows are not straight, but waving. The ground inside is settling, the blocks are tilting inside.

Up to 25% of internal volume is a flat rocky hill, on which the so-called "Grotto" chamber is placed.

Next, a "mastab" is built above, with the so-called "Queen's chamber", and the open corridor to it.

Later, the corridor was covered with stone roof.

Then they added some height and built the so-called "King's chamber".

Old pencil paintings are betraying the construction process.
Like the old egyptologist pyramid scheme, where the "Great Gallery" yet has no roof on top, lol.
Or the note that the rain has washed the ground from the gallery, and it became available. Inside the pyramid, lol.

All pre-XVIII paintings depict the pyramids having sharper shape of the so-called "pyramid of Cestius in Rome", and of the so-called "Nubian pyramids", which are much smaller. It proves, that nobody had seen real pyramids until they were finished in XVIII.
But the attempt to scale that shape up had fruited into the so-called "Snofru pyramid", having three different angles, because the ground inside the "stone pyramid" was sliding, so they had to make it more flat, then even more flat.
Finaly, the so-called "Hufu pyramid" (I believe, it's a joke from "Jefe") and others have the angle of the top segment of "Snofru", at which the ground hill was not sliding.

The "secret chamber", detected with muonometry right above the so-called "Great Gallery", is just less dense volume of the ground, settling above the gable roof of the gallery.

The so-called "Ancient Egyptian" "temples" and statues have countless autographs of the builders, stamped on the soft material, rather than the tourist scratches.

13 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Cleopatra lived closer to our time than the construction of the pyramids. 

While Cleo #7 and her brohusband Ptolemy #13 were thought out in early years of printing epoch (like other Ramesseses XVIII, the authors were tired of thinking out names and foreign marriages, so gave them numbers and forced to marry their sis and bros), i.e. in XV, it took two centuries to build the stone heaps, finished by the end of XVIII, in the Age of Steel.

So, I would guess the pyramids are much closer to us.

***

Famous Athanasius Kircher said that he had the whole Catholic world built in his workshop yard.

And the famous Bessarion of Nicaea had brought ~800 "Ancient Greek" books, translated into Latin, and was managing a whole literature fabric, "translating" the Platonists, Plotinists, Neo-Platonists, and so on.

***

To know the truth,
 

Spoiler

Spoiler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP

 

 

Edited April 19 by kerbiloid

[AckSed]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/metafluid-gives-robotic-gripper-a-soft-touch/

tl;dr adding hollow rubber spheres to a liquid allows you to make a colloid that decreases in volume but doesn't increase in pressure when exerting an external force. Thus, if you overpressurise a 'soft' gripper, the force it exerts does not exceed a certain threshold. This lets you engineer behaviours without using any control algorithms or electronics. It can be tuned by varying the size of the spheres, and stepped by adding different sizes of sphere.

By reducing the size of the spheres to micrometre sizes and using the right materials, they found that they could also tune the rheology (thickness) and opacity with pressure, as the clear spheres collapsing turned themselves into something like lenses.

I love simple things like this that have emergent behaviours.

I don't love the resistance the researchers faced because "this was not an interesting idea".

[darthgently]

Sobering facts

 

[AckSed]

Someone's looking to build a high-delta-V solar-thermal space-tug:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/new-space-company-seeks-to-solve-orbital-mobility-with-high-delta-v-spacecraft/

Honestly, best wishes and good luck to them. The solar moth was always one of my favourite concepts.