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Water Discovery Is Good News For Mars Colonists
astroengine writes "By now, we probably all know that there was once significant quantities of water on the Martian surface and, although the red planet is bone dry by terrestrial standards, water persists as ice just below the surface to this day. Now, according to a series of new papers published in the journal Science, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity has found that the Mars topsoil is laced with surprisingly high quantities of the wet stuff. And this could be good news for future Mars colonists. 'If you take a cubic foot of that soil you can basically get two pints of water out it — a couple of water bottles like you'd take to the gym, worth of water,' Curiosity scientist Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, N.Y., told Discovery News."
Pint, quarts and gallons are US measurements. In my region, we use milk jugs. We added the conversion to water bottles for heathens outside the US who haven't been educated in how to properly measure liquid.
Yes. I'm not american and I have no idea how big a pint is. Can I get that in litres please?
Lousy explanation using lousy measures ... if your audience can't understand standard units, just say what fraction by weight would be extractable water.
And if they don't understand fractions?
No sig? Sigh...
Oblig XKCD
No. We agreed to use imperial only. Didn't we? Oh, shit! I have a phone call to make.
water bottles like you'd take to the gym
These comparisons are ridiculous- how can we know the amount of water indicated without knowing which gym we're taking it to, or what kind of workout we'll be doing? Is it aerobics? Weightlifting? Spin class? Are we just pretending to work out while ogling attractive people? Treadmill? We would need different amounts of water for each of these! Please provide information in units we can actually use.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure the discovery of martian yeast would be big news on its own.
Witch! It's 13.5 minas to the hogshead!*
*I spent way too much time working that out.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I generously offer as the first plant to go to Mars a sample of the very hardy crabgrass found in my yard. I'm sure it will do fine there.
Pint, quarts and gallons are US measurements. In my region, we use milk jugs. We added the conversion to water bottles for heathens outside the US who haven't been educated in how to properly measure liquid.
Heathens??? Pot, meet kettle. All the "civilized" countries use metric nowadays - decijugs, centijugs, millijugs, and so on.
/ And the same units work for bra sizes, too!