A literal ton wouldn’t do anything measurable but yeah, adding more material of lower atomic numbers would in theory work considering it’s a fusion engine and wouldn’t exactly scoff at having to break the water molecule before using it.
Edit: like maybe if there was a star with a bunch of particularly wet planets around it and you somehow deorbited them, since as far as I’m aware the elements heavier than iron are just dead weight, they wouldn’t put out the star or anything.
I mean, if you add enough iron I believe it would eventually disrupt fusion, but you’d need an incredible amount, far more than you’d ever get from orbiting planets.
As I understand it, the problem isn’t the presence of iron, but rather when it starts fusing silicon into iron, as that particular process consumes more energy than it releases, thus eating away at the radiation pressure that keeps the star “held up.”
I was thinking that the added inert mass would decrease the likelihood of individual fusion reactions as well as eventually overpower the radiation pressure due to its effect on total gravitational force, but honestly I don’t really know what I’m talking about so I could be completely wrong.
First, not all dinosaurs were huge. It’s not a trait of dinosaurs in general. Rather, the environmental factors in the past and some factors that are true for reptiles, allowed being huge as an acceptable evolutionary niche, more than today!
Why would some of them grow so big:
In evolution, it’s always a bit of a hen and egg problem. And there is between species competition called “Red Queen Hypothesis”.
So a likely explanation is that, due to high CO2 atmosphere, plants grew larger which lead to having a long neck or being tall being an advantage. And for carnivorous species bigger herbivores meant that being bigger is an advantage. That, again, meant their prey had pressure to grow bigger (and/or faster), and so on and on.
How could some of them grow that much:
Dinosaurs are reptiles, so they were poikilothermic. Since temperatures have been higher and more stable at their time, a bigger body allowed to keep body temperature stable as well. It doesn’t cool off as fast which allowed more activity which allowed eating more which allowed a bigger body.
There was also significantly more oxygen in the atmosphere which is associated with bigger growth in all species since our metabolism depends on it.
This is especially true for Arthropoda btw, some of them were huge in the time of dinosaurs because they breath through their exosceleton. The biggest centipede found (yet) was 2.5 m long! The difference in size between insects in the past and insects today is much bigger than between reptiles today and in the past. All due to bigger plants and more oxygen and the interaction spiral between prey and predator.
An “integer” is a whole number- a number that isn’t a fraction/decimal. You can have negative integers/whole numbers, and 0 is also an integer that isn’t truly positive or negative.
If you specify that you want a positive whole number/integer that technically wouldn’t include 0, same if you specify a negative number.
So if you’re looking for a value that is a whole number that is either zero or positive “non-negative integer” is probably the most succinct way to phrase it.
They can also be called “natural numbers” but depending on context, that may not always include 0.
“‘There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.’” From: www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2814
There were (and are) a ton of utterly ridiculous beliefs about what can cause harm to women, but I find this one particularly amusing in an age where millions of women fly on planes. Imagine the plane takes off, leaving all those wayward uteri spinning in the dust at the gate…
Like... they did realize any acceleration strong enough to cause your uterus to go flying out would also be strong enough to make all your other internal organs fly out too? And that men, in fact, have internal organs?
Some beliefs along these lines have been used more recently in extremely religious places like Saudi Arabia.
"If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards,” ...
“That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees,”
Humans generate 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity in a year. The sun dumps nearly that much on earth in 1 minute. That’s a 6 order of magnitude difference. So I’m going to assume that human heat generation is probably negligible.
Under normal circumstances; you feel feedback from your actions. Kick something, and you’ll immediately, before you’ve finished applying force, feel pain in your foot. That pain causes you to reduce the amount of force you’re applying, both to end the pain and to prevent damage. This is an automatic subconscious reaction.
Add in a shot of a adrenaline though, and that pain feedback is heavily subdued. Your brain doesn’t register the signal to pullback, so you follow through with more force than you otherwise would be able to before self preservation kicks in.
the messed up thing about getting old is that you can start hurting yourself doing things that used to be “easy”. like lifting heavy weight or gripping something tight (like opening a jar). all of a sudden it feels like your muscles are breaking your joints and damaging your tendons/ligaments. its the muscle memory that gets you into trouble. good times, good times.
It really is. I once broke my foot running up some stairs. It was an emergency and as I was running I caught the edge of one step with just two toes(I did have shoes on) the ball of foot missed the stairs completely. Instead of slowing down or trying again I just pushed hard throwing my weight forward. Find out later that I had a radial fracture of my second metatarsal. The crazy thing is I spent the next few hours walking on a broken foot and didn’t feel it at all.
I did feel it the next day though. Fuck that hurt .
I don’t see how anything non-Newtonian would be better against sudden sounds. In fact it would be worse, as they’d get more solid and thereby transmit MORE of the noise you’re trying to block out. Or maybe they only get more rigid but their sound transmission properties don’t change at all. Either way, sounds somewhat pointless.
The only way I can think that something like this would work would be to have a molded vacuum chamber as an ear plug, with a specifically engineered sound transmission bridge inside. With too much energy trying to go through, it would break. But I doubt it would be quick enough to be effective, and they’d also be one time use, and extremely fragile.
It’s a bit oversimplified, actually. Sound bounces off of discontinuities in the medium, which is why foam works. You just have to control the scattering somehow.
The big problem with using oobleck or whatever is it responds to shear, and shear can’t travel through air. You could use it for earthquake protection, though, or if you could channel compressive waves from the air into shear form using a fancy bridge like in OP.
There are lots of strange options besides newtonian fluids. Would be interesting to see how dilatant, peusdoplastic, thixotropic etc react to sounds. Perhaps there is a way to make a material that allows quiet sounds to pass through and blocks all the loud ones. My guess is that dilatant liquids should be a good candidate.
A quick search tells me this have to do with shear forces. Sound would be entirely compressive, so those material properties would have no effect, or at least not change due to sound levels.
That’s unfortunate. Just like OP, I would have really liked the idea of using a non-newtonian fluid to filter out certain types of sounds without using electricity. Well, I guess, we’re back to active noise canceling then.
Your mood and thought processes can affect your hormones and other parts of your body. Think of something scary, and you can make your pulse race and your palms sweat.
But if you get chased by a tiger, your pulse is going to race far more, and your whole body will sweat.
There’s no amount of thinking you’re being chased that equals the effect of actually being chased.
Additionally, working out causes muscle micro tears (from what I understand), which is part of the mechanism for building muscle. Like you said, no amount of imagination will produce the physical effects of exercise.
I think the phrase down the rabbit hole is actually referring to Alice in Wonderland. But.
I would say the organism that tends to burrow the deepest into the Earth is humans. Average oil well depth appears to be around 5,964 feet (1818 meters), that’s pretty deep. The deepest hole we ever drilled is supposedly the Kola Superdeep Borehole dug by the Soviets, it was 40,230 feet (12.2km) deep.
Oh, that’s a fair point on both counts, I should have specified non-human organisms. Still, we’re apparently really good at digging deep holes, so that’s fun!
No. Unless that hot water is very, very hot vapor, you’re just adding more mass that’s going to be cooled by the original cold water. And even with vapor, the heat transfer between a hot gas and cool liquid just doesn’t happen fast enough, the vapor will be in the atmosphere before the water heats up very much.
A good rule of thumb is that the energy needs to go somewhere. So if the adapter was drawing a significant amount of power, it would get warm to the touch.
That’s true - And with a halfway decent thermal camera, you can see most of these unused chargers as “hot” spots. They’re so low power that they’re only slightly above ambient, but still something the cameras can see.
That’s how I found out that my desktop speakers consume power even with the physical button being off and status light dark. The power brick stays warm indefinitely, a good 20W feels like! I have to unplug that thing now when not in use. Any normal power brick will be <1W of course.
Im dealing with all rule breaking behavior. The unsourced comments have now been removed as the user is unable to provide a source to backup their claim. The comments that break civility rules, including this one, are also being removed.
Please report rule 9 violations so that we can act on them.
The source provided by another user gives a definitive counter argument.
From the article: “ The wheat kernel contains 8%–15% of protein, from which 10%–15% is albumin/globulin and 85%–90% is gluten (Fig. 1).1 Gluten is a complex mixture of hundreds of related but distinct proteins, mainly gliadin and glutenin. Different wheat varieties vary in protein content and in the composition and distribution of gluten proteins.”
loads of organisms that can digest gluten already exist. Not so much for polyethylene etc. Also gluten is made of proteins with definite length not polymers
Let me school you on this one, too. There are polymethylsilanes, polyphosphazines, etc. You aren’t even aware of common polymers like PVC that fall outside of your categories. There’s more exotic stuff like polyferrocenes. You ought to quit spouting off about things you know nothing about.
Generally in trees you have the xylem in the middle which transports water and minerals from the roots to the rest of the plant. You have the phloem on the outside, it transports photosynthetic products and nutrients to all parts of the plant. The cambium where growth happens sits between them, because there they get easy access to water minerals and nutrients. The xylem is a mix of living and dead cells. The tracheids and vessel elements in the xylem, which are responsible for water transport, are dead at maturity. So it’s probably too hard to move them to grow from the inside out for trees. This whole process of growing thicker is called secondary growth as opposed to primary growth at the tips of stems and roots.
Also if were the other way around and trees would grow from the inside out, you’d have to have vessels going from the leaves to the center of the stems to deliver nutrients, which just complicates everything. And the tree wanted to grow from the inside by 1cm, every “ring” in the xylem would have to grow one centimeter longer in circumference or crack. It’s much easier to just add a layer on the outside. Also having living layer around the tree probably helps it defend itself from pathogens. If all the mostly dead woody stuff was on the outside fungi etc would have an easier time invading, I think.
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