Cool Science thread

[This End Up]

When nerds go rogue:

https://youtu.be/Qe5WT22-AO8

[huckbucket]

Sure, but does it matter. I mean, what's a few hundred billion starts one way or the other.

Add some zeros

[byates1]

Heavy.

[old goat]

Add some zeros

Gazillion?

[byates1]

[whipski]

Last night at the Steamplant theater, served up Moonlight pizza, salad and cookies prior for free + open bar! Love this town. The prof was easy on the eyes too!

[Dantheman]

Please, please, please let this be true

Man thinks meteorite hit home after some in California see ‘bright ball fall from sky’
https://www.sacbee.com/news/californ...268396057.html

[Norseman]

[Norseman]

Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food


prehistoric peeps used fire for cooking @ ~780,000 years ago

[Dantheman]

Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food


prehistoric peeps used fire for cooking @ ~780,000 years ago

Damn, predates the earliest previous evidence by 600,000 years. They were clearly already adept at cooking, so this probably pushes actual first use of fire for cooking to at least 1 million years ago. This is a huge discovery, wow.

[whipski]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8435893/

[PB]

I'm in the right demographic and available for the upcoming clinical trials.

[J. Barron DeJong]

Not cool exactly, but geology is a science



video: https://twitter.com/rainmaker1973/st...VToW-nR1ePvYpg

[neufox47]

Probably a lot better to burn it than that amount of methane being released.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[ötzi]

I wondered if that ^^ was true.

"Through the practice of flaring, methane is oxidized (through combustion) to carbon dioxide (CO2) and water. From an environmental standpoint, flaring is better than venting since CO2 is 25 times less impactful as a greenhouse gas than methane over a 100-year timespan."

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/fi...g%20Report.pdf

[riser4]

Light your farts!!!

Ya, I know, human farts are 7% methane.

[huckbucket]

This is getting scary good. Ask it anything (fact based). Ask it to write your next email.

https://beta.openai.com/playground

[J. Barron DeJong]

.
.



https://twitter.com/johnmcelhone8/st...upR3-2obd2fDhw

[huckbucket]

Fusion breakthrough?

https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-...c-cfc345589dc7

"The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed."

The DOE says Energy Sec Jennifer Granholm will announce “a major scientific breakthrough” at the LLNL on Tuesday.

[J. Barron DeJong]

Fusion breakthrough?

https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-...c-cfc345589dc7

"The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed."

The DOE says Energy Sec Jennifer Granholm will announce “a major scientific breakthrough” at the LLNL on Tuesday.

Just yesterday I was reading a Twitter thread about the many advances being made in fusion, but as of yesterday, the biggest return was 70% of energy input.

Also said China had managed a fairly sustained reaction. Don’t recall the number, but it was thousands of seconds.

edit: Came across it again

https://twitter.com/arthurturrell/st...IlsRpLSE0hcd1g

[mud]

We really need something new to turn the steam turbines.

[mtnjam]

We really need something new to turn the steam turbines.

Yep, I've been saying that for years. We need to get away from steam spinning turbines to produce power, somehow, some sort of direct power from the energy produced. I'm sure someone here knows how much loss of energy occurs when you make that heat boil water, send it to a heat exchanger to heat more water that then turns a fan blade.

[J. Barron DeJong]

Yep, I've been saying that for years. We need to get away from steam spinning turbines to produce power, somehow, some sort of direct power from the energy produced. I'm sure someone here knows how much loss of energy occurs when you make that heat boil water, send it to a heat exchanger to heat more water that then turns a fan blade.

“Typically, most nuclear power plantsoperate multi-stage condensing steam turbines. In modern nuclear power plants, the overall thermal efficiency is about one-third (33%), so 3000 MWth of thermal power from the fission reaction is needed to generate 1000 MWe of electrical power.”

https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclea...steam-turbine/

That’s about the same percentage that an internal combustion engine extracts, and if I recall what I learned in fluid dynamics correctly, 1/3 is about the theoretical limit of what a wind turbine can achieve.

[Dantheman]

Yep, I've been saying that for years. We need to get away from steam spinning turbines to produce power, somehow, some sort of direct power from the energy produced. I'm sure someone here knows how much loss of energy occurs when you make that heat boil water, send it to a heat exchanger to heat more water that then turns a fan blade.

That's basically how solar works. But, if your energy source isn't photons from the sun you're pretty well stuck spinning magnets to generate electrical fields, AFAIK, and steam is the best way to do that.

[Norseman]

Yep, I've been saying that for years. We need to get away from steam spinning turbines to produce power, somehow, some sort of direct power from the energy produced. I'm sure someone here knows how much loss of energy occurs when you make that heat boil water, send it to a heat exchanger to heat more water that then turns a fan blade.

Well ya gotta spin the magnets somehow.