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It's useless science Friday in my head - Welcome to the show.

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  • #91
    That's probably the worst song I have ever heard in my life...
    Originally posted by Silverback
    Look all you want, she can't find anyone else who treats her as bad as I do, and I keep her self esteem so low, she wouldn't think twice about going anywhere else.

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    • #92
      So, while it's still Friday...

      How is it that I open a tasty beverage, return it to the fridge and shortly thereafter it's colder than it was previously, colder than one that's been in there all day?

      I enjoy that.

      Comment


      • #93
        Originally posted by Baba Ganoush View Post
        So, while it's still Friday...

        How is it that I open a tasty beverage, return it to the fridge and shortly thereafter it's colder than it was previously, colder than one that's been in there all day?

        I enjoy that.
        Evaporation.
        ZOMBIE REAGAN FOR PRESIDENT 2016!!! heh

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        • #94
          Even sealed containers?

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          • #95
            The world's biggest vacuum chamber - at NASA’s Space Power Facility - can reduce the 30 tons of air (800,000 cubic feet) to just 2 grams.

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            • #96
              Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/669/

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              • #97
                Originally posted by Baba Ganoush View Post
                So, while it's still Friday...

                How is it that I open a tasty beverage, return it to the fridge and shortly thereafter it's colder than it was previously, colder than one that's been in there all day?

                I enjoy that.
                Its perception...

                Comment


                • #98
                  Crystal with "Forbidden Symmetry" Found in 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite



                  A crystal with an “unorthodox” arrangement of atoms has been discovered inside an ancient meteorite that crashed into a remote area of northeastern Russia thousands of years ago. This is only the second time a natural so-called quasicrystal has been found. The work is published in Scientific Reports this week.

                  To understand the difference between crystals and quasicrystals, imagine a tiled floor. Hexagon-shaped tiles (with 6 sides) fit neatly next to each other to cover the entire floor. But if you lay down pentagons (5 sides) or decagons (10 sides) next to each other, you’ll end up with gaps between the tiles. In ordinary crystals, the atoms are packed closely together in a repeated and orderly fashion. But with quasicrystals, “the structure is saying ‘I am not a crystal, but on the other hand, I am not random either,'” Princeton’s Paul Steinhardt says in a news release.

                  Researchers used to think that these structures were too fragile and energetically unstable to be formed through natural processes. That is, until Steinhardt and colleagues stumbled on a crystal with these “forbidden symmetries” in 2009 in a rock collected years earlier in Chukotka, Russia. Called icosahedrite, that quasicrystal had the 5-fold symmetry of a soccer ball, and it originated in an extraterrestrial body formed around 4.57 billion years ago.

                  Based on experiments with X-rays, the newly discovered quasicrystal has a structure that resembles flat 10-sided disks stacked in a column (pictured to the right). This 10-fold symmetry is an impossible structure in ordinary crystals. "When we say decagonal, we mean that you can rotate the sample by one-10th the way around a circle around a certain direction and the atomic arrangement looks the same as before,” Steinhardt explains to Live Science.
                  ..

                  When the government pays, the government controls.

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                  • #99
                    Taking up space here to get off of the page with autoplay.

                    Comment


                    • One more oughta do it...

                      Comment


                      • Nope.. not yet... seriously, i just want to post something without that bullshit playing.

                        Comment


                        • OK, fuck this.


                          I hate you, Aaron.












                          Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy


                          for more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.

                          And they're still dreaming.

                          But thanks to the efforts of the max planck institute for plasma physics, experts hope that might soon change. Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.

                          The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the w7-x. And after more than a year of tests, engineers are finally ready to fire up the $1.1 billion machine for the first time. It could happen before the end of this month, science reported. Known in the plasma physics community as the "black horse" of reactors that use nuclear fusion, stellarators are notoriously difficult to build. The gif below shows the many different layers of w7-x, which took 19 years to complete:





                          from 2003 to 2007, as the project was being built, it suffered some major construction setbacks — including one of its contracted manufacturers going out of business — that nearly canceled the whole endeavor. Only a handful of stellarators have been attempted, and even fewer have been completed. By comparison, the more popular cousin to the stellarator, called a tokamak, is in wider use. Over three dozen tokamaks are operational around the world, and more than 200 have been built throughout history. These machines are easier to construct and, in the past, have performed better as a nuclear reactor than stellarators. But tokamaks have a major flaw that w7-x is reportedly immune to, suggesting that germany's latest monster machine could be a game changer.


                          how a nuclear-fusion reactor works

                          the key to a successful nuclear-fusion reactor of any kind is to generate, confine, and control a blob of gas, called a plasma, that has been heated to temperatures of more than 180 million degrees fahrenheit. At these blazing temperatures, the electrons are ripped from their atoms, forming ions. Normally, the ions bounce off one another like bumper cars, but under these extreme conditions the repulsive forces are overcome.



                          the ions are therefore able to collide and fuse together, which generates energy, and you have accomplished nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is different from what fuels today's nuclear reactors, which operate with energy from atoms that decay, or break apart, instead of fusing together. Nuclear fusion is the process that has been fueling our sun for about 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another estimated 4 billion years.

                          Once engineers have heated the gas in the reactor to the right temperature, they use super-chilled magnetic coils to generate powerful magnetic fields that contain and control the plasma. The w7-x, for example, houses 50 six-ton magnetic coils, shown in purple in the gif below. The plasma is contained within the red coil:




                          the difference between tokamaks and stellarators

                          for years, tokamaks have been considered the most promising machine for producing energy in the way the sun does because the configuration of their magnetic coils contains a plasma that is better than that of currently operational stellarators.




                          but there's a problem: Tokamaks can control the plasma only in short bursts that last for no more than seven minutes. And the energy necessary to generate that plasma is more than the energy engineers get from these periodic bursts. Tokamaks thus consume more energy than they produce, which is not what you want from nuclear-fusion reactors, which have been touted as the "most important energy source over the next millennium."

                          because of the stellarators' design, experts suspect it could sustain a plasma for at least 30 minutes at a time, which is significantly longer than any tokamak. The french tokamak "tore supra" holds the record: Six minutes 30 seconds.

                          If w7-x succeeds, it could turn the nuclear-fusion community on its head and launch stellarators into the limelight. "the world is waiting to see if we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse," david gates, the head of stellarator physics at the princeton plasma physics laboratory, told science.

                          Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of w7-x on youtube, or below:

                          Last edited by Strychnine; 10-31-2015, 11:54 PM.

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                          • Jesus. The majority of us are talking monkeys.

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                            • Seriously. I mean there's the whole "bottling a star" aspect, which in itself seems sci-fi, but that one piece of equipment will use both the hottest and coldest things in the universe at -452.2*F and +180,000,000*F at the same time.

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                              • Originally posted by Strychnine View Post
                                Seriously. I mean there's the whole "bottling a star" aspect, which in itself seems sci-fi, but that one piece of equipment will use both the hottest and coldest things in the universe at -452.2*F and +180,000,000*F at the same time.
                                I'm failing to understand how you contain a temperature that hot? Did we finally create Unobtanium?

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