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Cool science stuff

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 16 Jan , 2020 10:19 pm
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An interesting idea - it seems to be much smaller in scale than controlled burns. I have no idea whether it's practical, but all else being more-or-less equal during the Australian wildfires, it looks like a natural experiment in what works:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/ ... 29756.html
Quote:
How Australia's Indigenous people can help the country fight fire

Fire plays a central role in indigenous life and could hold the key to better management of bushfires in Australia.
Quote:
Aboriginal park ranger Trent Nelson walks through the bush, demonstrating traditional fire techniques.

He mimics the lighting of small spot fires on certain shrubs - fires his ancestors have lit for thousands of years before him.

"What happens, is when the fire goes through, a lot of these plants don't get impacted," he explained.

"The fire only gets to probably about [a foot] high as it goes through, so these are protected and they can grow. It also protects the trees in the canopy."...

When Aboriginal people use the word "country", they refer to the distinct region they come from, with pre-colonial Australia akin to an indigenous version of Europe.

And while catastrophic bushfires rage across much of Australia, the "country" of Djandak Wi is eerily quiet and peaceful....
I don't know anything about Australia's ecosystems but I do know that some ecosystems in California were adapted to regular fires. Until, of course, people started moving into them and any fires would have threatened those homes, so fires were suppressed and flammable fuels built up. I assume that, in some cases, this also resulted in changes in the vegetation and local ecosystems.
Anyway, a quick search came up with this, from 2008, on the role of fire in California's ecosystems. https://baynature.org/article/the-bright-side-of-fire/

Though I remember being told about things like this in nature programs more than 40 years ago.
https://www.nps.gov/seki/learn/nature/fic_firerole.htm
If I remember right (which is not certain :) ), there was something about there being no seedling/ replacement giant sequoias in the groves at the time because fires had been suppressed.


btw, I posted something about the respiratory virus outbreak in China the other day, but decided to delete it because it seemed too serious and gloomy for this thread. The outbreak is worrisome though. There's another case reported now, this one in Japan, and the virus has spread at least a little between people in China. And the worst part is that China is still hiding as much as possible, which makes me think it's bad there. A camera crew that filmed the fish market where it started had to delete their film before the police in China would release them.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 04 Feb , 2020 6:13 pm
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The politics behind virus naming. I think it's all a bit silly, myself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... me/605893/
Quote:
A Virus With a Deadly Boring Name

2019-nCoV isn't going to cut it long term.
Quote:
In the 20th century, virus hunters frequently named their discoveries according to geography: Spanish flu; Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever; Lyme, for the town in Connecticut; Ebola, for a nearby river. These names forever bound these locales to diseases that may or may not have actually originated there. In 2009, “swine flu” led Egypt to slaughter all of its pigs, even though that virus was not spread through swine. The National Pork Board in the U.S. hated the name too.

...This time, for 2019-nCoV, they will be working under the WHO’s best practices—created in 2015 to address the fraught process of naming. The best practices discourage geographic names, people, animal species, cultural references, and “terms that incite undue fear,” such as unknown, death, fatal, and epidemic. They encourage names that describe symptoms (such as respiratory, spongiform, deficiency), groups affected (juvenile, pediatric, maternal), time course (acute, transient), severity, seasonality (winter, summer), and even arbitrary identifiers (Alpha, beta, a, b, I, II, III, 1, 2, 3).

The extremely descriptive names that result from this process can be a mouthful, so the guideline suggests evaluating acronyms for offensiveness too. SARS, for example, is an acronym for “severe acute respiratory syndrome,” which checks all the boxes for descriptive terms. But SARS was also uncomfortably close to SAR, or Hong Kong’s designation as a special administrative region in China.....

If you adhere completely to these guidelines, it can be tough to come up with a good descriptive/ memorable name that doesn't make it sound like dozens of similar diseases. Like the last flu pandemic, where the PC name of the H1N1 virus (calling it "swine flu" was strongly frowned upon in the US) made everyone tie themselves in knots trying to distinguish it from the usual H1N1 viruses in people. And that pandemic from the 1918 pandemic, which was caused by a completely different H1N1 virus but is not supposed to be called the Spanish flu anymore. (Both viruses eventually became ordinary flu viruses, like all of the new influenza viruses that stick around in people.)



btw, The Atlantic writer made a mistake here, as far as disseminating accurate information/ not scaring people about this coronavirus (and this is really basic stuff, available on the CDC website and dozens of other places):
Quote:
(Corona refers to the crown-shaped spikes found in coronaviruses, a group that includes MERS and SARS but normally only infects animals.)
This is absolutely wrong. There are some coronaviruses circulating in people. They're just ordinary cold viruses, if you're healthy, though they can cause bronchitis or pneumonia in the very young, the elderly, and people who are already sick.

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Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 25 Feb , 2020 9:02 pm
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Just FYI. The headline is clickbait and almost certainly nonsense (my guess is that more men had other illnesses that made them vulnerable, compared to the women) but the stats they quote are useful:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/18/coronav ... gests.html
Quote:
The records detailed 44,672 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, 16,186 suspected cases and 889 cases where the carrier of the coronavirus displayed no symptoms
If this virus is like most viruses, that last number is going to end up being a huge underestimate. But it's no one's priority, right now, figuring out how many people were exposed but didn't get infected, or got infected but never knew it.

This is the important part:
Quote:
Case fatality rate increased with age, with 14.8% of cases in people over age 80 resulting in death. Patients ages 70 to 79 had an 8% fatality rate, while those 60 to 69 had a fatality rate of 3.6%.

Researchers calculated an overall fatality rate of 2.3%, with a total of 1,023 deaths recorded among the confirmed cases of the virus in the study.

Cardiovascular disease was the preexisting condition most associated with increased fatalities, with the study reporting a fatality rate of 10.5% in patients who suffered with the condition. Diabetes sufferers had a fatality rate of 7.3%, while the frequency of fatalities was also higher than the overall rate in people with chronic respiratory disease, hypertension and cancer.

In patients with no reported underlying conditions, the fatality rate dropped to 0.9%, according to the study.

Like most viruses (including influenza, which kills a lot more people each year than this coronavirus has, so far), it's hitting the sick and elderly the hardest.

Also important to remember that all the published death rates so far are from China, where the hospitals were overwhelmed, seriously ill people were turned away, others were given a dose of intravenous antibiotics (which won't do a damned thing against the virus itself) and told to go home, and pictures of their pop-up instant hospitals showed wards full of hundreds of side-by-side beds, not isolation facilities.

The big question now is really how widely it will spread (though the numbers of new cases in China now seem to be dropping). With the outbreaks in Italy and Iran, and cases now popping up elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East, I doubt very much that this virus will be contained. But, as long as the number of sick people doesn't overwhelm the hospitals, I'm betting the death rates from cases outside China will be lower than the numbers published so far.
And, of course, someone will eventually go out and figure out how many mild or symptomless cases there really were, and that will probably drop the numbers even more.




btw, the name of the virus ended up being either COVID-19, according to the WHO, or SARS-CoV2, according to the ICTV, the organization that usually keeps the official names of viruses. WHO doesn't like SARS-CoV2, because the SARS part could "induce fear." I admit that I don't like the SARS part either, because this coronavirus didn't come from the same animal and it's not causing the same disease.

But I also preferred it when humans were allowed to name the new diseases anything they liked, i.e., the sorts of names humans usually come up with and can remember, and the powers-that-be just let the most popular names prevail. Lyme disease reminds me of how the disease was discovered- a bunch of kids were getting arthritis in the Lyme, CT area, which was odd and prompted a search for the cause. COVID-19 sounds like something in a futuristic sci fi novel.




Oh, and the Trump administration seems to be a clown show, with no one bothering to get a briefing from the CDC before talking to the press. I'd just pay attention to the CDC and ignore the rest of them, like Kudlow and Trump, who are clueless.

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Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Wed 26 Feb , 2020 11:41 am
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I am somewhat sceptical of 2.3% overall fatality rare because of how steady the reported number has been, but it seems to hold in the Italian outbreak.

The real number could be more if
• China is under reporting
• early deaths were assumed from other causes
• more people who are sick now will die after extended illness
• early cases were healthy adults, spreading to more vulnerable family members

It could be less if most cases turn out to be mild and assumed to be flu, as you said, or if China is OVER reporting as an excuse to to impose drastic measures to suppress protests in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

The biggest threat to the American public right now is the healthcare system where most people can't afford to see the doctor wiry flu symptoms, and the work environment where people cannot take time off when sick.

I only go to the CDC site for news. Everyone else is just reporting on what they say.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Wed 26 Feb , 2020 4:30 pm
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Frelga, in my experience the death rate is almost always overestimated in the early stages of an outbreak, simply because you pick up the obvious and most serious cases first and the mild or asymptomatic ones go undetected. The best analogy is an iceberg. What you see first is on top of the water, but there's a vast bulk of asymptomatic and mild cases underneath the water. We'll find out about those once people start running antibody surveys in the general population. That will undoubtedly take a while. I'm not even sure if they have an antibody test right now that doesn't cross-react with the "common cold" coronaviruses.


btw , it is highly unlikely that the early cases were mostly in healthy adults. That's not what the Chinese paper says. And that's not the norm anyway.

South Korea is apparently reporting a case fatality rate of about 1% overall. I suspect that will turn out to be a decent estimate for the early cases in a country with a good healthcare system. I still expect the ultimate case fatality rate overall (in all age groups) will be lower. I could turn out to be wrong, but I doubt it.

(Edit: It seems a paper in The Lancet is reporting a case fatality rate of 0.7% in the rest of China, compared to the 2-3% in Wuhan province. This is consistent with S. Korea.)


*The case fatality rate is the death rate among people who actually get sick.




Not that I disagree with CDC, warning people to take this seriously. That's the responsible thing to do when things are still uncertain. And this definitely looks like a serious threat to those with underlying health conditions, given the widespread susceptibility (no one has immunity from previous exposures, assuming no cross-reactive immunity from other circulating coronaviruses - I assume this is the case given it's a novel virus from an animal source, though I haven't really seen anything about it. Too early, I'm sure.)

In my opinion, the biggest threat from this will be if it spreads too quickly and there are too many serious cases for the hospitals (especially when flu season is still going on). This is one reason that slowing its spread as much as possible is smart. That, and it will give more time for vaccine development. It sounds like one is about to enter early clinical trials in the U.S. But production will still take a while even if it's fast-tracked and the first doses will almost certainly be targeted to high risk groups like the elderly. I assume other countries are also working on vaccines.


Quote:
or if China is OVER reporting as an excuse to to impose drastic measures to suppress protests in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
I can't see this at all, except as a conspiracy theory. China shut down a great deal of its economy during the outbreak response, though it seems they're restarting it in some places. They're not fools. And they've never needed an excuse before for serious crackdowns on protesters.

Yes, they could have been over-reporting COVID-19 cases but that's because some cases are always diagnosed presumptively during outbreaks. In other words, someone came down with a serious respiratory illness, the doctor didn't or couldn't run a test, and maybe it was actually influenza and not coronavirus. This is normal and happens everywhere during outbreaks, not just China. It doesn't really matter unless the treatment would be different.


As an aside, it's about time those young idiots in Hong Kong stood down. They achieved all their goals and were doing nothing useful, while making it harder for Hong Kong's government to walk its fine line with China. Not that this surprised me. There were huge protests and riots years ago, when Hong Kong officials tried to loan some works of art to the Met in New York. I never did understand why, except maybe the easy spread of outrage among the young.

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Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Wed 26 Feb , 2020 7:57 pm
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Quote:
Frelga, in my experience the death rate is almost always overestimated in the early stages of an outbreak, simply because you pick up the obvious and most serious cases first and the mild or asymptomatic ones go undetected.
That is true. If you can capture asymptomatic cases, for example by testing everyone in contact with a sick person, regardless of symptoms, your denominator will rise and the death rate fall.

On the other hand if the illness is prolonged, then the death rate may rise once earlier cases had time to progress.

There's a variety of ways that death rate can be calculated. One example would be deaths / (recoveries + deaths), which would tell you what actually happened to sick people. But that is not a real time measure.

The CDC communication has a bit of split personality. On the one hand, there is solid information from the public health and science people. On the other, there are policies implemented or discussed by the administration.

It may be my Soviet background, but when I see a communication that says "this administration took unprecedented steps," I automatically fill in the missing "which we think are bullshit." (There's an art to reading official communications under an authoritarian regime.)

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Wed 26 Feb , 2020 11:08 pm
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Quote:
If you can capture asymptomatic cases, for example by testing everyone in contact with a sick person, regardless of symptoms, your denominator will rise and the death rate fall.

On the other hand if the illness is prolonged, then the death rate may rise once earlier cases had time to progress.

There's a variety of ways that death rate can be calculated. One example would be deaths / (recoveries + deaths), which would tell you what actually happened to sick people. But that is not a real time measure.
Frelga, I'm sorry, I just don't have the time or energy to explain things. Some of this is sort of semi-true, but not really how things work. For instance, no one with any background in epidemiology is going to look for how many asymptomatic cases there were by testing contacts, for a respiratory illness where 80% have mild illnesses, and expect to get a valid number. There's just too high a probability that you've got too many transmission chains going on all over and not being noticed. And serious respiratory cases rarely linger once they've gone critical, when you've got substandard care (serious/ critical respiratory cases were the only ones even getting admitted to Wuhan's hospitals, by all accounts).

When you find out the real numbers is usually much, much later. For instance, do you remember when West Nile virus entered the U.S. and everyone was worried about a cluster of people with serious neurological illnesses in the New York City area? Panic, etc. Then they started testing people in the area and found quite a few with antibodies and no disease, or maybe a mild flu-like illness. In the end, it turned out that less than 1% who get infected get that serious form. That's what often happens, to a greater or lesser degree. It's simply a function of not enough information in the beginning of an outbreak, and the sickest people getting noticed first.


And, in this case, what looks like a mess of a response in Wuhan, thanks to too many cases, too few resources, and open wards that looked rather like Petri dishes for spreading and concentrating the virus (maybe they put in some respiratory controls after those pictures were taken, but I doubt it). Not exactly a best case scenario.

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Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 28 Feb , 2020 1:39 am
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Quote:
For instance, no one with any background in epidemiology is going to look for how many asymptomatic cases there were by testing contacts, for a respiratory illness where 80% have mild illnesses, and expect to get a valid number.
Once you get an epidemic in the thousands of cases, you can't follow all lines of transmission. When you have a handful, like the US does now, you do. That's how you stop an epidemic.

It seems that the contact required is more than casual, since we don't see people getting sick by a plane load. I've seen reports say that it's airborne, but that's not accurate. As far as we know, it's spread by droplets but not aerosol particles like measles.

There's a first case of "unknown origin" in California. It is in proximity to the Travis AFB where some of the returning Americans are quarantined and UC Davis where some of the patients were treated. But one can't rule out a coincidence.

WaPo also reported that a whistle-blower raised concerns about HHS workers assisted evacuees without protective gear or training, while the CDC staff was there in full bunny suits. Some of this personnel were at the Travis AFB and then went out into the community. But that's probably also a coincidence.

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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 28 Feb , 2020 1:41 am
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Quote:
For instance, no one with any background in epidemiology is going to look for how many asymptomatic cases there were by testing contacts, for a respiratory illness where 80% have mild illnesses, and expect to get a valid number.
Once you get an epidemic in the thousands of cases, you can't follow all lines of transmission. When you have a handful, like the US does now, you do. That's how you stop an epidemic.

It seems that the contact required is more than casual, since we don't see people getting sick by a plane load. I've seen reports say that it's airborne, but that's not accurate. As far as we know, it's spread by droplets but not aerosol particles like measles.

There's a first case of "unknown origin" in California. It is in proximity to the Travis AFB where some of the returning Americans are quarantined and UC Davis where some of the patients were treated. But one can't rule out a coincidence.

WaPo also reported that a whistle-blower raised concerns about HHS workers assisted evacuees without protective gear or training, while the CDC staff was there in full bunny suits. Some of this personnel were at the Travis AFB and then went out into the community. But that's probably also a coincidence.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 28 Feb , 2020 3:21 pm
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[EDIT] I deleted this post because:
1. I'm not sure we're even using the same terminology. For instance, you mentioned that "The contact required seems to be more than casual." Well, "not transmitted by casual contact" has a specific meaning. It pretty much says you can't get the disease by doing something like standing next to a sick person in the grocery store checkout line for a few minutes. And it would also imply that you're OK going out in public because it usually takes close, prolonged contact, like within a family, to spread it. Of course that's not true for cold and flu viruses.

2. Any discussions of airborne, droplets/ aerosols, uncertainties in science, etc. , could be misunderstood by people who don't have sufficient knowledge/experience, the way bits of scientific (and often preliminary) information about COVID-19 are getting picked up on and misunderstood and amplified on social media, and sometimes in the media.

3. I was mildly cranky after seeing too much of that last factor for the past few weeks.


Let's just say I'm very, very skeptical of anyone claiming we can keep this virus out of the U.S. now, or that the most likely way it could have gotten into the country is from the quarantined people. Given that it seems to be popping up all over the world, it would not come as the tiniest surprise if it was already here, spreading between people who think they just have a cold or the flu. Containment, testing, and disease tracing isn't nearly as easy as it sounds on paper. Especially when you've got an open society and a disease that doesn't look or act all that different from other contagious respiratory diseases.

And, though COVID-19 seems to be a nastier respiratory virus, compared to the usual flu and cold strains, especially in the elderly and immunocompromised, it's not the Andromeda strain. It's just another respiratory virus that has entered the human population. It's not the first virus to do this and it won't be the last. State and local health departments (which do most of the actual work during an epidemic, not the federal government) handled the 2009 flu pandemic just fine.

Last edited by aninkling on Sat 29 Feb , 2020 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 28 Feb , 2020 9:18 pm
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Quote:
Again, I don't have time to explain to you
No worries. I am well served in that department.

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Jude
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 20 Aug , 2020 2:03 pm
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Car-sized asteroid makes closest pass to Earth ever recorded without collision

The article says that the asteroid was only detected after the flyby, which doesn't bode well for our ability to detect and prevent these collisions in the future :scared:

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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 21 Aug , 2020 2:28 pm
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Yikes!

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Jude
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 15 Oct , 2020 1:08 pm
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Canadian YouTubers engineer hyper-realistic plasma lightsaber that can cut through steel
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James Hobson's lightsaber is not a toy.

The engineering YouTuber and his team at Hacksmith Industries in Kitchener, Ont., have created a hyper-realistic, retractable plasma lightsaber that reaches a scorching heat of 2,200 C.

"That's above the melting point of most metals," Hobson told As It Happens host Carol Off. "It's pretty dangerous."

Hobson and his team unveiled the prototype on their YouTube channel Hacksmith last week. They plan to release a second video Thursday in which they'll use the lightsaber to cut through metal siding, a Stormtrooper mannequin and a steel plate "similar to a bank vault door."

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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 15 Oct , 2020 4:41 pm
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Cool!

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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 15 Oct , 2020 10:39 pm
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I feel that inventing Star Wars level arm prosthesis should take priority over inventing a light saber that can take off an arm with one careless sweep.

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Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 16 Oct , 2020 10:13 am
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Yeah, but it wouldn't be as cool :)

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Jude
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Mon 09 Nov , 2020 7:16 pm
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Tremendously exciting news in the world of travel:

Virgin Hyperloop hosts first human ride on new transport system
Quote:
In a hyperloop system, which uses magnetic levitation to allow near-silent travel, a trip between New York and Washington would take just 30 minutes. That would be twice as fast as a commercial jet flight and four times faster than a high-speed train.
I don't know if it's practical to build one across an ocean, but at least within the continent it would be much preferable to air travel. To me anyway.

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Dave_LF
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Mon 09 Nov , 2020 9:00 pm
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So what happens if you hit a deer?


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Jude
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Mon 09 Nov , 2020 9:44 pm
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I think the track is enclosed. How would a deer get in?

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