Drive by science

[JoeP]

I hate those constrictive comments.

[JoeP]

New Zealand's earthquake was so intense, it lifted the sea bed 2 metres above ground - ScienceAlert







New Zealand earthquake raised seabeds by more than a metre

Has a video with "strong language which may offend some viewers" ("holy shit") and voices of "shocked locals".

[JoeP]

To which we say

show spoiler

RISING!

[Vivisectus]

Interesting developments around a possible EM drive - a propellant-free propulsion system:

fluffy version: NASA demonstrates EM Drive theory, but don't get too excited

Actual paper: http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120

Really interesting - this is starting to look like something we can make work.

[ceptimus]

I think part of the way it works was already demonstrated by the Pioneer anomaly.
But the remaining 'not compatible with current laws of physics' part I wouldn't get too excited about yet - they probably just haven't located the source of error in their experiment.

[Dragar]

I would be very, very surprised if this doesn't turn out to be another case of experimental error. I would bet good money the results aren't able to be reproduced outside of that lab.

Perpetual motion devices are always wrong.

[Vivisectus]

Speaking of really cool tech:

Confirmation of the topology of the Wendelstein 7-X magnetic field to better than 1:100,000 : Nature Communications

I mean what is there not to like about fusion. It is clean, produces enormous amounts of energy, and we can make the fuel for it out of water and Lithium. We have loads of it on earth, and we could get more from the moon if required. And to top it off fusion reactor designs have awesome star trek-sounding names like Tokamak and Stellarator.

Looks like we are one small step closer to creating a working Stellarator (best name evah), which means we can keep all the magnetic stuff on the outside, which could be an important advantage in the long run as we do not need to use the plasma itself to help create some of the magnetic fields (I think I almost got that right, but not quite?)

Can some of our resident physics boffins weigh in on this one?

[Dragar]

Oh man. Fusion.

In principle there's nothing wrong with the idea. It's just really hard. Forty years ago, the joke runs, we were forty years away, and today we're merely forty years away.

The new tokamaks - should bey be built - are often designed with technologies and materials in mind that do not yet exist (but are assumed to do so due to technological progress). I don't know how much improvements in the magnetic field designs are already 'penciled in', but it's quite possible this is one of those.

2050 doesn't seem too optimistic to me. But 2015 didn't seem too optimistic to people in 1975.

The other point is that it has to be economical in terms of money, not just energy in versus energy out. That's going to take even longer, to get the construction costs of these things way down. It might be 2100 by the time that rolls around. Assuming we haven't cooked the Earth in greenhouse gases by then.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by JoeP

New Zealand earthquake raised seabeds by more than a metre

Has a video with "strong language which may offend some viewers" ("holy shit") and voices of "shocked locals".

Have they determined who owns it yet?

It will be interesting to see how many idiots want to build on the new land, and then cry for Gov. help when it sinks back into the sea.

[Vivisectus]

Thanks for crushing yet another dream, physics boffins! Stupid reality

[fragment]

Originally Posted by thedoc

Have they determined who owns it yet?

Prior to uplift the intertidal and subtidal area was declared to be "unowned" but with various rules regarding access and use. I haven't found information on what happens in cases of sudden uplift, but by analogy with the cases of land reclamation and accretion I would guess the former status continues to apply but adjoining landowners may have rights to claim for adjustment of boundaries to reflect the new reality.

Sudden new land after earthquakes has happened here before, but not for some time and the legal situation has changed. For example, here are before and after diagrams of changes to an estuary from the 1931 Napier earthquake. Over 2000 hectares of lagoon were affected and there is now an airport on the former lagoon.

[JoeP]

'Beautiful' dinosaur tail found preserved in amber - BBC News

"We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained.

"Instead, the tail is long and flexible, with keels of feathers running down each side."

...

The findings also shed light on how feathers were arranged on these dinosaurs, because 3D features are often lost due to the compression that occurs when corpses become fossils in sedimentary rocks.

The feathers lack the well-developed central shaft - a rachis - known from modern birds. Their structure suggests that the two finest tiers of branching in modern feathers, known as barbs and barbules, arose before the rachis formed.

Artist's impression:


So cute!

[Crumb]

Really cool stuff. Actual piece of dinosaur.

[The Lone Ranger]

In fairness, downy feathers in modern birds generally lack a rachis. Downy feathers on modern birds are not shaped to streamline the body for flight, nor to provide lift, as are the contour feathers and primary feathers. Rather, the downy feathers of modern birds help in thermoregulation, by helping to trap air near the body surface and so helping retain body heat.

Feathers most-definitely did not evolve for flight. Rather, feathers almost-certainly evolved for thermoregulatory purposes, and birds later adapted the feathers they inherited from their theropod ancestors for flight purposes.


As such, it isn't surprising that the feathers of non-flying dinosaurs more closely resembled the downy feathers of modern birds than the contour and primary feathers. In fact, it would be rather surprising if this was not the case.


[This is not to say that some non-flying dinosaurs didn't adapt their feathers for other purposes, such as display. So it's not unlikely that some non-flying dinosaurs did have specialized feathers that superficially resembled the contour and/or primary feathers of modern birds.]

[Ari]

Little did we know, dinosaur shapped chicken nuggets were ahead of their time!

[Ari]

Question, I often see raptor like dinosaurs as the example of feathered dinos but did other dinos have feathers or fluff as well? Such as the many herbivores?

[The Lone Ranger]

In all likelihood, most dinosaurs were feathered to at least some extent, particularly the smaller species. The bigger ones may have had some quills (perhaps for display purposes), but most probably weren't covered in feathers. For the same reasons that modern elephants don't need to be covered in fur -- they were plenty big-enough that their sheer body mass would have acted as insulation.

That having been said, there were plenty of dinosaur species living in what's today Antarctica, and also in regions that were north of the Arctic Circle at the time. Antarctica wasn't as far South as it is today, but there were plenty of dinosaur species that lived in regions that would have been quite cold during the Winters. That is, there were plenty of dinosaurs living in Arctic and Antarctic regions, dinosaurs who would have experienced long, snowy Winters and weeks or months at a time where there was little or no sunlight. As such, it's not at all unlikely that there were some species of large, feather-covered dinosaurs, just as there were Wooly Rhinos and Wooly Mammoths during the last Ice Age.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[SR71]

World's smallest radio receiver has building blocks the size of two atoms | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

The radio uses tiny imperfections in diamonds called nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. To make NV centers, researchers replace one carbon atom in a tiny diamond crystal with a nitrogen atom and remove a neighboring atom — creating a system that is essentially a nitrogen atom with a hole next to it. NV centers can be used to emit single photons or detect very weak magnetic fields. They have photoluminescent properties, meaning they can convert information into light, making them powerful and promising systems for quantum computing, phontonics and sensing.

Can't quite get the essence of this. They act like scintillators?

Seems like an opto-electrical link more than a radio from what I get from the video. No, take that back. A green laser is used to power the little nano receivers, a bit like Vcc to a transistor? The little atom pairs are more analogous to diodes or crystal diodes?

[SR71]

Seems the information is normal radio frequency. The rf stimulates the little decoders to put out red light, which is then made into an electrical signal through photodiodes. Pretty neat I guess. Essentially they are scintillators that are sensitive to rf.

[ceptimus]

I wonder how the RF reaches the detectors? Presumably they just apply an RF voltage across the whole diamond. The detectors would then just need to change the green light to red when they were biased by, say, a positive voltage and leave the green light unchanged for the opposite voltage.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Found in a recent cracked article.

A Drug to Cure Fear - New York Times

An end to conspiracy theorist hucksters. Ahhhhhh.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Fake news invades science and science journalism as well as politics

Misc non-news.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Related to fake science news:

This ‘predatory’ science journal published our ludicrous editorial mocking its practices | Ottawa Citizen

Giggleworthy read.

[JoeP]

Scientists turn nuclear waste into diamond batteries that last virtually forever | Inhabitat - Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building

Diamond batteries? I didn't know diamonds needed batteries. This explains so much ...

Moar: Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste Into Long-Lived Diamond Batteries, Diamond battery - Wikipedia