Posts by Axman

Leaked paper suggests EM Drive tested by NASA actually works

It just might be low energy photons providing the thrust

I don't see why this is so puzzling. If it works it is probably due to photons being ejected out of the 'nozzle', after all photons are the force carrier of the electromagnetic force. the photons don't have to be in the visible spectrum either, they could easily be microwave radiation.

If the sun's mass is kept from collapsing inwards by the light pressure of photons why can't a simple motor operate by using photons: energy produced by solar radiation converted into electricity and then further transformed down into microwave photons. it doesn't even violate Newton's third law!

Dark matter? More like diet matter: Super-light axions may solve universe's mass riddle

Re: stupid question - what do these axions do?

The dirty low paid jobs mostly.

Re: The problem is no one is able to reproduce the result

If you can't reproduce it, I'd suggest it wasn't a result.

A bigger splash: The mathematics of spilling beer

Re: New line of investigation

You missed out 8/. milk bottle

I only ever drink my pints out of a milk bottle. I have one stashed behind the bar of my local*. Even when the pub bully deliberately bangs into the table, mine's the safest pint in the establishment.

*(spoiler alert: I have of course made that up)

New Brit Hubble analysis finds 2,000 billion galaxies, 10x previous count

Re: Are some here misinterpreting this finding?

Yep.

It is, however, the author's* fault as it seems it was he/she/it that first misrepresented what the scientific article had to say.

[* I was fairly certain that authors' names used to be supplied. When did that end?]

Astronauts on long-haul space flights risk getting 'space brains'

Rodentism

"After the rodents were exposed, they were shipped off to another lab... to investigate how radiation impacted their tiny brains."

Tiny Brains!!! How very dare they!

Intel-backed boffins demo long-lived silicon qubit

In the Future...

So, when I whip out my Qbit smart phone in ten years time to send a quick text to my mam, my hand'll drop off due to it suddenly being plunged to near absolute zero.

More work needed methinks.

Rosetta probe spots Comet 67P being buzzed by boulder

67P had reached perihelion. It obviously shot its rocks off at that point. Wouldn't you?

Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station

Re: I wanna be hired for the conceptualisation team.

... my second area of interest would be formatting the Martian year into something a little more user friendly. My initial thoughts would be to have bank holidays named after specific key stage events, and each having a nominated patron saint. Thus: Foundation Day would obviously be the day the first lander arrived; it's patron would be Saint Elon Musk himself.

Another would be the day the first nuclear reactor sent from Earth was installed in the colony, Atomic Day: I think St Debbie Harry would be the appropriate patron for that day (Oh-o Atomic...)

I wanna be hired for the conceptualisation team.

My first area of interest would be dosh creation. We could start off with an exchange rate of one US Dollar to one Mars Unit. Once enough resources have been built up on the Martian surface we could have a central vault, and then of course we would move to the Mars Bar standard with the Mars Unit's value directly linked to actual transported and stored Mars Bars. Eventually of course, once a proper government had formed, we would dump the Mars Bar standard in favour of proper monetary fiat.

Cosmology is safe and the Universe is one giant version of the Barbican

> "Go outside and point in any random direction. What happens if you keep going, and going, and going (forever). Where do you end up? Is there no end, or do you somehow come back around on yourself? Or something else?"

It doesn't matter, because you'll take so long to get there that by the time you do, it'll have moved off elsewhere anyway...

Pluto's emitting X-rays, and NASA doesn't quite know how

Re: There was nothing in my horoscope about this this morning.

When the IAU demoted Pluto to dwarf planet status did they take into account the poor old astrologers (or rather, the extremely avant garde cultist section of astrologers who had managed to accept that there were more than five planets)? I bet they didn't.

And while we're on the subject, I think they made a mistake with 'dwarf planet', midget planet surely!

Jeff Bezos' thrusting cylinder makes Elon Musk's look minuscule

....but third US astronaut to make a flight. (Not counting the apes.)

Why aren't we counting the apes?

Jokes of no more than 2 lines

I secretly swapped over all the chocolate bars and wrappers in our fridge the other day.

My missus didn't find it at all funny though, she got her Snickers in a Twix.

I went to a pub quiz in Liverpool last night. I won.....

I put Stevie Gerrard for every answer.

Second 'dimmer switch' star spotted

I don't get the enthusiasm. What's so exciting/unique/questionable/gripping/enigmatic about a very young star being partially eclipsed by a bunch of amorphous matter in an unpredictable pattern. S'bleedin' obvious that that's what some suns will look like in the early stages of planetary formation, shirley?

Microsoft thinks time crystals may be viable after all

Yep. Me too. Not a word.

Missing Milky Way mass blown away by bingeing supermassive black hole

Elephants

I'm confused. How do 'they' know that there is some missing ordinary (baryonic) matter?

We can see/measure 65 billion solar masses worth. But we can't see/measure between 85 billion to 235 billion solar masses worth. How do we know this, when we can't see the approximately 1,800 billion solar masses worth of 'stuff' composed of dark matter. Maybe there is only 65 billion solar masses of ordinary matter plus 2,000 billion solar masses worth of dark magicky matter.

And how do we know how much stuff is there anyway when we can't even pin down the total for the galaxy to anything more precise than about 1,000 billion solar masses, or *cough* maybe that should be 2,000 billion solar masses.

...and this solar mass unit, how many elephants is that precisely? Maybe there's a large degree of uncertainty over just how many elephants make a solar mass, just as there is about how many solar masses make up our galaxy.

So can I suggest for the sake of less confusion that the galaxy is defined as being composed of 65 brontogigaelephants (where elephants may be either indoelephants or afroelephants) of visible matter, with an extra 85 brontogigaelephants worth of invisible matter plus 850 brontogigamammoths of yet more invisible matter. (NB to all intents and purposes a mammoth is equal to one elephant if you are just using them as weights).

Ancient radioactive tree rings could rip up the history books

> "If archaeologists two thousand years hence screw up and think that WWII occurred in 2000, (only a 60 year difference) they'd be hard pressed to prove it happened, and might consider it a "legendary war", like the Trojan War was once thought to have been." <

We know of the Trojan war through literature. A certain amount of archaeological evidence can be tied into a 'war'. The literature then guides the archaeology.

If in future an archaeologist is examining WWII artefacts they will be viewing them through the prism of historical records and not poetical literature. The historical records will have a date associated with them and it's hardly likely that 1945 will mutate into 2000.

plus the most obvious 'archaeological' dig two thousand years from now associated with a WWII site would most probably be at Hiroshima. Given that any object discovered there with a date associated with it would state Showa 20 and not 1945, it is still more probable that lists of conversion dates would still exist that would pinpoint the object to 1945 rather than somebody would mysteriously assign a year of 2000 to it.

Re: Unless you are a Christian who cares...

The most obvious new reference point would be the birthday of Mitochondrial Eve. As we don't know when exactly her birthday was then we will need to make a bit of a guess. we know she was born some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, so I'd suggest making today 23rd August 102,016 with her birthday on the 1st January 0 ME

In this schema the Battle of Hastings took place on 14th October 101,066, the Battle of Actium took place on 2nd September 99,970, and the very first Olympic Games took place in 99,225.

No more before this or after that nonsense for historical (and a vast swathe of prehistorical) stuff.

Re: You're 1500 years out!

No. The furthest back we can trace Donald Trump's ancestors is to the second miyake spike where his ancestor on his maternal side is Domnall Cìreadh Mòr Thairis

NASA to begin first asteroid sample mission: Seeks 'pristine' specimen

It’s around 1,900 feet long - approximately the length of ninety five adult giraffes laid out head to feet. Adult giraffes require very little sleep so that if all the giraffes were landed on Bennu, and they optimised their sleep patterns so that as few as possible were nodding off together, on average eighty seven of them would be awake at any given moment.