except to give you a really spectacular lightshow during the last few minutes of your existance....
seconds. Small number of seconds.
Oh, OK, you could allow a three minutes for the shock wave to arrive. But much longer than that and the light show happens well below your local horizon.
Actually, the paper shows approximate contemporanity. It is only weak evidence for Chixulub causing a change in the rate of eruption in the Deccan Traps.
Just like with Wegener and his plate tectonics (specifically, his proposed propulsion mechanism, the "Polar Flight"), the proposed mechanism for a triggering is deeply unconvincing. If such small deliveries of seismic energy could trigger a significant change in a volcanic region's plumbing, then we'd have known for millennia that volcanic eruptions are strongly correlated with the phase of the Moon, when in reality if there is any such correlation it is so weak that people are still arguing about it's validity. That doesn't support the crust being weak enough that seismic waves from an impact on the other side of the planet could substantially re-plumb a thousand-km long volcanic district.
That Wegener's theory of plate tectonics proved to be correct after another half-century of work and a complete replacement of the "Polar Flight" mechanism with mantle convection does nothing to make the "Polar Flight" mechanism more convincing.
an entirely new state where aspects of the previous state are not necessarily applicable.
So, almost completely the wrong simile then.
Say the universe has three fossil sites, A, B, and C, each with well-recorded context (associated fossils, well-understood sedimentary and taphnonomic contexts), solid dating. You add a 4th site - this one - with some genuine questions over the details of sedimentology, taphonomy. Does this constitute a "quantum leap"? The existence of the 4th site in no way invalidates the existence of the first 3.
Sithrak, I hate that phrase. There is a spit for people who use it.
Once such a machine were turned on the atmospheric pressure and temperature on Mars would rise sufficiently within a handful of years to remove the need to wear a space suit.
"a handful of years" - well, a handful of millennia, unless someone provides some energy from somewhere. Quite a lot of energy - I really should work out how much one day.
Oh, and that would be if you moved most of the mass of the Asteroid Belt - the icy bits - from flying through a few hundred cubic.AU of space onto the planet's surface. That would certainly provide some energy to the surface, but I wouldn't want to be on the target while it's happening.
It's great that Elon shares his weed with you. But I wouldn't go around trying those plans without someone sober reviewing them.
That is very definitely not the methodology or data sets that the paper describes. Did you actually read it? It's perfectly comprehensible, doesn't use too many long words, and only takes about 3/4 hours.
The atmospheric pressure of Mars obviously varies with altitude (distance from the planet centre). The "zero" for altitude, since there is no sea level to work from, is taken as the point where it has a pressure of 600 Pa (kg/m^2), which is near the middle of the range. That is 0.006 of the atmosphere of Earth. This pressure is below the triple point of water and water ice would directly sublime to the vapour without going through a liquid phase. In the deeper basins of Mars (equivalent to the Dead Sea, Caspian Sea, and Death Valley, but several kilometres deeper) you might be able to get liquid water to be stable, but you'd have to heat it to around 10degC (70 or 80 deg hotter than the general surface) and seal it into a plastic bag to actually get the water to condense again, as the ppH2O (Partial Pressure of water) would be in the bag along with a significant amount of CO2, which would dilute the water vapour, making it harder for "rain" to form.
it'd rain "earlier" than it would in equivalent conditions on Earth.
It'd rain later. Sorry, but Kim Stanley Robinson knew he was playing fast and loose with the gas laws in his fiction, even if some people (Elon Musk, I'm looking at you!) have taken the fiction as fact.
I haven't read the full study, so I'm not sure what they're positing.
I just did RTFP, and it is a lot more tentative than the press blurb makes out. As normal.
Could have been large impact-driven vaporization events that temporarily create a denser, water-rich atmosphere, perhaps?
They don't much discuss that, but throughout they emphasis that they're examining peak flow rates, not average (mean), median or modal flow rates. That is certainly compatible with thee flows only occurring in the period following large impacts releasing a substantial temporary increase in atmospheric pressure. Then, the water would rain out (over a period) as the atmosphere and planet surface cools, producing large if temporary run-offs. Then the CO2 would freeze out onto the ice caps and into the soil before being buried again by dust. Lather, rinse, repeat, with a caveat that when you put water high into the atmosphere, some of it gets photolytically stripped to release hydrogen to space and oxygen (which goes into the sol as iron-3 oxide). Much as has been modelled previously.
Their synthetic figure 5 certainly shows that sporadic precipitation events their vision, not continuous precipitation through the Amazonian, Noachian &/or Hesperian.
though I'm not sure how you'd sustain huge brine-filled rivers for billions of years;
That is certainly the image that many commentators here have. Possibly also the writers of the press blurb.
It's not in the paper.
It's not in their model.
It's not in their text.
It's not in their figures.
This is why reading the "puff" press releases is normally a complete waste of time. Just go get the paper - it's quicker than building up a idea which the scientists involved are simply not discussing, then having to tear down that misconception and start again from scratch.
Personally I'm more curious about Venus's rivers,[...] but most likely is that it's thermal erosion by rare (by Earth standards) types of low-temperature lavas, such as carbonatites or similar.
With a surface temperature in the region of 450degC, the cooling rates of lavas are going to be very different to what we're familiar with on Earth. Compounding that, the high ppCO2 in the atmosphere is going to reduce devolatilisation of the lavas, retaining their initial low viscosity for... a hard to calculate amount. Don't get me wrong, carbonatites are fascinating (one of my friends while doing my degree was doing his PhD in UK carbonatites- fascinating rocks!), but such exotic melts are probably not necessary to postulate for these long Venusian channels (NB : Schiaparelli's warning : "channels" without implication about the origin of the structure). These magma types are "exotic" on Earth because they're at the end of a differentiation process - to form a cubic km of carbonatite melt you'd need to start with a couple of hundred cubic km of regular basalt, and you get that by processing around 10000 cubic km of mantle-like material (which is, unsurprisingly, close to the average of non-ice, non-H/He material in the solar system). Those many cubic km of other materials processed to produce your carbonatites will be somewhere, and you'll see the structures they generate far more often.
and rapidly oxidize to bright white after cooling.
That's probably materials like sodium carbonate and sodium hydrogen carbonate weathering out very rapidly as the rocks self-metamorphose on their own residual liquors. And it's the case for carbonatite lavas. Far larger volumes of carbonatites solidify below ground as relatively small bosses and cupolas on the margins of per-alkaline igneous intrusions.
Not sure if you're trying to play for laughs, but... it's not just a question of individual protein binding sites for getting into a cell (as you say, is important for virii and some bacteria). In order to mechanically invade a tissue (e.g., skin - your biggest organ), an organism needs at some point to adhere one cell wall onto another from which it can get the anchorage to drive pseudopods or whole filaments into the structure.
Different tissues have different adhesions proteins - that's how, for example, your eyelids can stick together but not stick to your eyeball - and the precise proteins vary from one species to another. But they do form families of related proteins, more closely related in more closely related species. (If I recall correctly, some of the first evidence that whales were more closely related to hippopotamuses than any other animals came from the proteins on the surfaces of their respective blood cells which would coagulate with each other. Yes, those troublesome blood groups are the result of adhesion proteins.)
Oddly, it's a complicated subject. A few tens of thousands of species, each one with a few hundreds of relevant protein families, the mutual interactions of any with any being potentially significant.
Brexiters ruined that country, businesses hate FUD more than anything else. All Brexit has done is poison England for business.
The really annoying thing is that Brexit is in the process of fucking England (which voted, marginally, for it) and Scotland (which voted against it). And it's likely to cause Ireland problems too - but the EU will be trying to mitigate those problems.
Britain =/= England, in the same way that there are, apparently, some people in America didn't vote for the Tangerine Shitgibbon.
Subject pretty much says it all. Not being average is bad for your health.
The furore about NASA not having enough medium-size space suits reflects on the same problem - many devices are only designed to fit a certain, small, part of the population.
Not that it matters, but my IPD is 72 mm - as I've known from having set up hundreds of binocular microscopes over the years.
You pay once for a fitting done by a professional and those settings recorded and s/"used next time"/lost/
FTFY, HAND.
Personally, I always offend these professionals by insisting on getting these settings (e.g. my eyeglass prescription) written down on their headed note paper (so I've got their phone number too) then keep them in the spectacle case with my old pair old specs - which is now my spare pair.
To further annoy them, I use metal frames which I can re-glaze when I've got 2 spare pairs. Which means they can't sell me another pair of frames. (After about a decade, the hinges and springs wear out, but that's on the third glazing.)
They tried to sell me a pair of prescription-lens diving goggles. I save nearly £200 on those - and got better goggles by going to a specialist.
De-extinction is rife with seemingly intractable problems.
... most of which are ethical rather than about the possibility of the procedure.
Going to locate and clone a sufficient number of unique preserved specimens to avoid inbreeding?
If you've developed a technique, you will almost certainly already have tried a variety of samples from a variety of sources before you get one which works. So when you've found a solution that works, you try it on the previous samples which didn't work with different techniques. As long as you produce a second, preferably female, specimen before the first (also preferably female - you can probably do a parthenogenetic tweak with two females more easily than with two males) one dies, then you've got the basis of an expanding population. The amount of new genetic material you need to introduce into a small, significantly inbred population in order to forestall major problems is lower than people think. (Non-artificial reintroductions of predators in several locations have shown this, to some people's surprise.)
What about reproducing its entire exterior/interior microbiome - especially the essential gut flora?
That would almost certainly be desirable. Which is a different thing to necessary.
Giving Specimen #1 and #2 gut flora from the closest living relative (probably the surrogate mother's species, even if you had to do a premature Caesarian before the infant killed the mother) would probably be a good enough start. Give #3 a gut flora from another relative then letting the three run together (and cross-contaminate ; alternatively, move fresh dung from one enclosure to another) would allow internal natural selection do what it's good at.
But you've still got to recreate something resembling a working environment for them to live in. Otherwise it's a tour de force of genetics, good advertising, and fuck all good for the animals. Ethical problems.
Facebook is going to go down? Do you know when - I think I need to unroll the body bags I store in the basement and get ready for the people who die of it's lack.
It is also meant to keep groundwater in. By putting a low permeability seal around the site, they're insuring themselves against future accidents in the clean-up (e.g., a storage/ treatment tank leaking, again). It's a standard technique - relatively expensive but well established. When I was doing my degree in the 1980s, the local sewage processing plant was being re-built which included a similar "ice wall" to prevent previously spilled shit from being flushed into the adjacent sea. Beach sands are not the easiest of ground to stop water moving through, and the ice wall was the only technique they found that worked.
The chloride in the seawater does nasty things to concrete too, and they needed to manage that while setting foundations.
Uranium mineral rights are largely held by the English Royal Family and amount to some 35 Trillion dollars.
Can I get a smoke on that - it must be some strong shit.
If you'd claimed that the Crown Estate - a very different thing to the Royal Family (hawk, spit) held a lot of U mineral rights, then you could make an argument involving Canadian and Australian deposits. But I think you'd struggle to get that argument by a mineral lawyer from either sovreign government, and the UK certainly doesn't have the armed forces to take on either country, let alone both at once.
But U deposits outside the former British Empire - go whistle. Whistle Derby & Joan, or Dixie, or whatever you want, you're not going to get even small change for it.
I'm almost tempted... just on country area, Russia is going to have about 1/6 of the world's U resource. While I get some popcorn, why don't you tell us how you make out that that belongs to Queen Brenda and the Big-Eared inbreed (hawk, spit).
UK reporting (this is about start-of day time in USA?) is that Boeing shares are 12.9% down, which is enough to get any company's attention.
The ground search (well, digging into the ground) has located both FDR (Flight Data Recorder) and CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) for the crashed aircraft, which should help greatly in determining what the problem was/ is.
gets me the label of 'far right' or so on, despite being fairly oriented with the moderate left (US political surveys always peg me as a Democrat).
That would be about right. By the standards of the Rest of The World, the 95% that isn't American, then a fairly left wing person (by American standards) would be counted as a ravening right winger. But for some peculiar reason, Americans don't see themselves for the small and peculiar minority that they are.
it is probably just as likely that the "Atheists Research Centre" is an organisation for religious nutjobs.
My first interaction with something resembling the Internet was through Compuserve's forums a 1200bps modem and a £0.05/min phone line. Which was clunky enough. I go nosing around - "Is there anything interesting here?"
It mush have been shortly after some USian massacre by a gun-nut - which could be any random week - because I saw a forum called "Gun Control" and thought "That may be interesting."
P>It wasn't. They were absolute nutters. Quite educational, but not in the way they intended.
We are far more likely to be wiped out by your (plural, not just your own) children than by an asteroid, on a foreseeable timescale of a couple of centuries.
That said, MPML was just seeing some discussion of a possible Earth impactor a couple of months before 2029's Apophis near-miss. Which will get the "sky is falling" crowd running around, screaming.
Slashdot Mirror
seconds. Small number of seconds.
Oh, OK, you could allow a three minutes for the shock wave to arrive. But much longer than that and the light show happens well below your local horizon.
"Hot Fudge Sundae - which happens on a Tuesday this year," to quote an SF novel about asteroid impact.
Just like with Wegener and his plate tectonics (specifically, his proposed propulsion mechanism, the "Polar Flight"), the proposed mechanism for a triggering is deeply unconvincing. If such small deliveries of seismic energy could trigger a significant change in a volcanic region's plumbing, then we'd have known for millennia that volcanic eruptions are strongly correlated with the phase of the Moon, when in reality if there is any such correlation it is so weak that people are still arguing about it's validity. That doesn't support the crust being weak enough that seismic waves from an impact on the other side of the planet could substantially re-plumb a thousand-km long volcanic district.
That Wegener's theory of plate tectonics proved to be correct after another half-century of work and a complete replacement of the "Polar Flight" mechanism with mantle convection does nothing to make the "Polar Flight" mechanism more convincing.
So, almost completely the wrong simile then.
Say the universe has three fossil sites, A, B, and C, each with well-recorded context (associated fossils, well-understood sedimentary and taphnonomic contexts), solid dating. You add a 4th site - this one - with some genuine questions over the details of sedimentology, taphonomy. Does this constitute a "quantum leap"? The existence of the 4th site in no way invalidates the existence of the first 3.
Sithrak, I hate that phrase. There is a spit for people who use it.
Wrong, by several hundred years.
"a handful of years" - well, a handful of millennia, unless someone provides some energy from somewhere. Quite a lot of energy - I really should work out how much one day.
Oh, and that would be if you moved most of the mass of the Asteroid Belt - the icy bits - from flying through a few hundred cubic.AU of space onto the planet's surface. That would certainly provide some energy to the surface, but I wouldn't want to be on the target while it's happening.
It's great that Elon shares his weed with you. But I wouldn't go around trying those plans without someone sober reviewing them.
That is very definitely not the methodology or data sets that the paper describes. Did you actually read it? It's perfectly comprehensible, doesn't use too many long words, and only takes about 3/4 hours.
It'd rain later. Sorry, but Kim Stanley Robinson knew he was playing fast and loose with the gas laws in his fiction, even if some people (Elon Musk, I'm looking at you!) have taken the fiction as fact.
I just did RTFP, and it is a lot more tentative than the press blurb makes out. As normal.
They don't much discuss that, but throughout they emphasis that they're examining peak flow rates, not average (mean), median or modal flow rates. That is certainly compatible with thee flows only occurring in the period following large impacts releasing a substantial temporary increase in atmospheric pressure. Then, the water would rain out (over a period) as the atmosphere and planet surface cools, producing large if temporary run-offs. Then the CO2 would freeze out onto the ice caps and into the soil before being buried again by dust. Lather, rinse, repeat, with a caveat that when you put water high into the atmosphere, some of it gets photolytically stripped to release hydrogen to space and oxygen (which goes into the sol as iron-3 oxide). Much as has been modelled previously.
Their synthetic figure 5 certainly shows that sporadic precipitation events their vision, not continuous precipitation through the Amazonian, Noachian &/or Hesperian.
That is certainly the image that many commentators here have. Possibly also the writers of the press blurb.
It's not in the paper.
It's not in their model.
It's not in their text.
It's not in their figures.
This is why reading the "puff" press releases is normally a complete waste of time. Just go get the paper - it's quicker than building up a idea which the scientists involved are simply not discussing, then having to tear down that misconception and start again from scratch.
With a surface temperature in the region of 450degC, the cooling rates of lavas are going to be very different to what we're familiar with on Earth. Compounding that, the high ppCO2 in the atmosphere is going to reduce devolatilisation of the lavas, retaining their initial low viscosity for ... a hard to calculate amount. Don't get me wrong, carbonatites are fascinating (one of my friends while doing my degree was doing his PhD in UK carbonatites- fascinating rocks!), but such exotic melts are probably not necessary to postulate for these long Venusian channels (NB : Schiaparelli's warning : "channels" without implication about the origin of the structure). These magma types are "exotic" on Earth because they're at the end of a differentiation process - to form a cubic km of carbonatite melt you'd need to start with a couple of hundred cubic km of regular basalt, and you get that by processing around 10000 cubic km of mantle-like material (which is, unsurprisingly, close to the average of non-ice, non-H/He material in the solar system). Those many cubic km of other materials processed to produce your carbonatites will be somewhere, and you'll see the structures they generate far more often.
That's probably materials like sodium carbonate and sodium hydrogen carbonate weathering out very rapidly as the rocks self-metamorphose on their own residual liquors. And it's the case for carbonatite lavas. Far larger volumes of carbonatites solidify below ground as relatively small bosses and cupolas on the margins of per-alkaline igneous intrusions.
They ca
Different tissues have different adhesions proteins - that's how, for example, your eyelids can stick together but not stick to your eyeball - and the precise proteins vary from one species to another. But they do form families of related proteins, more closely related in more closely related species. (If I recall correctly, some of the first evidence that whales were more closely related to hippopotamuses than any other animals came from the proteins on the surfaces of their respective blood cells which would coagulate with each other. Yes, those troublesome blood groups are the result of adhesion proteins.)
Oddly, it's a complicated subject. A few tens of thousands of species, each one with a few hundreds of relevant protein families, the mutual interactions of any with any being potentially significant.
Anything, and it is tainted by the rest of the utter shit that is going on with the mess that is parliament.
Nokia was Finnish, not Norwegian. They don't even speak languages in the same language group.
Then some bunch of Americans brought it, made it into a laughing stock, and ... does it still actually exist in a meaningful sense?
The really annoying thing is that Brexit is in the process of fucking England (which voted, marginally, for it) and Scotland (which voted against it). And it's likely to cause Ireland problems too - but the EU will be trying to mitigate those problems.
Britain =/= England, in the same way that there are, apparently, some people in America didn't vote for the Tangerine Shitgibbon.
Probability of backfiring badly can't be lower than ... 0.99 ?
The furore about NASA not having enough medium-size space suits reflects on the same problem - many devices are only designed to fit a certain, small, part of the population.
Not that it matters, but my IPD is 72 mm - as I've known from having set up hundreds of binocular microscopes over the years.
FTFY, HAND. Personally, I always offend these professionals by insisting on getting these settings (e.g. my eyeglass prescription) written down on their headed note paper (so I've got their phone number too) then keep them in the spectacle case with my old pair old specs - which is now my spare pair.
To further annoy them, I use metal frames which I can re-glaze when I've got 2 spare pairs. Which means they can't sell me another pair of frames. (After about a decade, the hinges and springs wear out, but that's on the third glazing.)
They tried to sell me a pair of prescription-lens diving goggles. I save nearly £200 on those - and got better goggles by going to a specialist.
If you've developed a technique, you will almost certainly already have tried a variety of samples from a variety of sources before you get one which works. So when you've found a solution that works, you try it on the previous samples which didn't work with different techniques. As long as you produce a second, preferably female, specimen before the first (also preferably female - you can probably do a parthenogenetic tweak with two females more easily than with two males) one dies, then you've got the basis of an expanding population. The amount of new genetic material you need to introduce into a small, significantly inbred population in order to forestall major problems is lower than people think. (Non-artificial reintroductions of predators in several locations have shown this, to some people's surprise.)
That would almost certainly be desirable. Which is a different thing to necessary.
Giving Specimen #1 and #2 gut flora from the closest living relative (probably the surrogate mother's species, even if you had to do a premature Caesarian before the infant killed the mother) would probably be a good enough start. Give #3 a gut flora from another relative then letting the three run together (and cross-contaminate ; alternatively, move fresh dung from one enclosure to another) would allow internal natural selection do what it's good at.
But you've still got to recreate something resembling a working environment for them to live in. Otherwise it's a tour de force of genetics, good advertising, and fuck all good for the animals. Ethical problems.
Facebook is going to go down? Do you know when - I think I need to unroll the body bags I store in the basement and get ready for the people who die of it's lack.
The chloride in the seawater does nasty things to concrete too, and they needed to manage that while setting foundations.
Can I get a smoke on that - it must be some strong shit.
If you'd claimed that the Crown Estate - a very different thing to the Royal Family (hawk, spit) held a lot of U mineral rights, then you could make an argument involving Canadian and Australian deposits. But I think you'd struggle to get that argument by a mineral lawyer from either sovreign government, and the UK certainly doesn't have the armed forces to take on either country, let alone both at once.
But U deposits outside the former British Empire - go whistle. Whistle Derby & Joan, or Dixie, or whatever you want, you're not going to get even small change for it.
I'm almost tempted ... just on country area, Russia is going to have about 1/6 of the world's U resource. While I get some popcorn, why don't you tell us how you make out that that belongs to Queen Brenda and the Big-Eared inbreed (hawk, spit).
The ground search (well, digging into the ground) has located both FDR (Flight Data Recorder) and CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) for the crashed aircraft, which should help greatly in determining what the problem was/ is.
That would be about right. By the standards of the Rest of The World, the 95% that isn't American, then a fairly left wing person (by American standards) would be counted as a ravening right winger. But for some peculiar reason, Americans don't see themselves for the small and peculiar minority that they are.
My first interaction with something resembling the Internet was through Compuserve's forums a 1200bps modem and a £0.05/min phone line. Which was clunky enough. I go nosing around - "Is there anything interesting here?"
It mush have been shortly after some USian massacre by a gun-nut - which could be any random week - because I saw a forum called "Gun Control" and thought "That may be interesting." P>It wasn't. They were absolute nutters. Quite educational, but not in the way they intended.
And the news is?
That said, MPML was just seeing some discussion of a possible Earth impactor a couple of months before 2029's Apophis near-miss. Which will get the "sky is falling" crowd running around, screaming.