Cool Science thread

**JimmyCarter** · 07-27-2023, 02:06 PM

arxiv for the room temp superconductor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

**J. Barron DeJong** · 08-01-2023, 10:51 AM

Maybe it’s actually for real this time?

Click image for larger version.

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https://twitter.com/andercot/status/...sR_NcRK2VkCfkg

Click image for larger version.

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https://twitter.com/andercot/status/...sR_NcRK2VkCfkg

**gravitylover** · 08-08-2023, 12:21 PM

Artificial photosynthesis https://scitechdaily.com/more-effici...valuable-fuel/ Apparently this is more efficient than the natural process. Time to start taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrogen for commercial fuels.

**old goat** · 08-08-2023, 01:21 PM

Last I heard natural photosynthesis doesn't produce methane. Not sure doing that is such a great idea. Using natural photosynthesis to produce biofuel isn't that great of an idea either--maybe better than getting carbon fuel out of the ground but it's not going to solve the climate problem.

**jackattack** · 08-08-2023, 01:43 PM

Yeah let’s convert sequestered co2 into methane to burn and transfer that co2 into the atmosphere as fast as possible. Pretty soon the methane window will open and we’ll be truly fucked.

**This End Up** · 08-09-2023, 07:03 PM

Originally Posted by J. Barron DeJong

Maybe it’s actually for real this time?

Nope

https://www.popularmechanics.com/sci...m=social-media

**J. Barron DeJong** · 08-09-2023, 08:10 PM

Originally Posted by This End Up

Nope

https://www.popularmechanics.com/sci...m=social-media

dang.

**ötzi** · 08-09-2023, 08:23 PM

Well that sucks.

**JimmyCarter** · 08-10-2023, 02:16 PM

Fifth force of nature?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66407099

**This End Up** · 08-25-2023, 05:26 PM

India soft landed on the moon, and Russia did not.

But some people have questions:

https://babylonbee.com/news/india-ac...ZJ54ZIfCCwoJc0

**Kenny Satch** · 09-02-2023, 07:13 PM

Everything you wanted to know about a lightsaber but were afraid to ask.

**Norseman** · 09-05-2023, 06:55 PM

knots...

history and tabulation of knots, modern knot theory, applications w/ biological protein structures, topoisomerase work, etc

**bodywhomper** · 09-05-2023, 10:56 PM

Are salps slimy?

https://x.com/planktonpundit/status/...Mbjk5ElmdWLRnQ

**bodywhomper** · 09-10-2023, 01:35 PM

I only have access to the abstract:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...um=ownedSocial

Pretty amazing bottleneck

Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event.

I editor’s summary

Today, there are more than 8 billion human beings on the planet. We dominate Earth’s landscapes, and our activities are driving large numbers of other species to extinction. Had a researcher looked at the world sometime between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, however, the picture would have been quite different. Hu et al. used a newly developed coalescent model to predict past human population sizes from more than 3000 present-day human genomes (see the Perspective by Ashton and Stringer). The model detected a reduction in the population size of our ancestors from about 100,000 to about 1000 individuals, which persisted for about 100,000 years. The decline appears to have coincided with both major climate change and subsequent speciation events. —Sacha Vignieri

**Dantheman** · 09-10-2023, 04:25 PM

Pretty incredible if correct.

**bodywhomper** · 09-10-2023, 04:49 PM

Yeah. Correct until corrected by another model.

**Buster Highmen** · 09-19-2023, 07:26 PM

It's not really science, per se, it's math. And the best thing about it is that, the discoverer, David Smith, is not a professor or professional mathematician.

An aperiodic tiling is a non-periodic tiling with the additional property that it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic regions or patches. A set of tile-types (or prototiles) is aperiodic if copies of these tiles can form only non-periodic tilings.

The Penrose tilings are a well-known example of aperiodic tilings.[1][2]

In March 2023, four researchers, David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, announced the proof that the tile discovered by David Smith is an aperiodic monotile, i.e., a solution to the einstein problem, a problem that seeks the existence of any single shape aperiodic tile.[3]

Aperiodic tilings serve as mathematical models for quasicrystals, physical solids that were discovered in 1982 by Dan Shechtman[4] who subsequently won the Nobel prize in 2011.[5] However, the specific local structure of these materials is still poorly understood.

Several methods for constructing aperiodic tilings are known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperiodic_tiling