I was looking for pictures for my Cassini-Huygens project and found out that there are pdfs for a papercraft version of cassini huygens there were two versions, a simple version and a complicated version the simple version was 3 pages long, 2 1/2 were just bits, the other one was 20 fucking pages long it was ridiculous small print, 5 pages of pieces black and white, kinda blurry text i would link but i can only find it on my ipad, which is dead rn i ended up printing and making the simple one, over about 4 hours all together
This shit is some bomb ass archeology! I super dig ancient cultures and this shit, especially ones I've never heard of. I'm probably gonna go on a huge research spree when I have more spoons. A theory on why people think prehistoric clothes are ill-fitting and shapeless; corpses shrink when they mummify. Clothes do not shrink, so the clothing if reasonably preserved look much too big on their shrunken wearers. Artists and the general populace don't take the desiccation into account and interpret the clothes as badly fitting.
i got interested because of this book: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-32019-0/ my mom gave it to me years ago because she knows i'm interested in ancient textiles, but there's so much more in the book than textiles. i like your theory. colors fade, as well, so ancient textiles tend to come out of the tomb as a sort of earthy dun color, but that's not necessarily how they went in! urumqi is a treasure trove because its cool, dry climate as well as the ancient people's burial practices preserved both textiles and bodies so amazingly well. i wish we knew their story. you've got this little population of nordic/germanic looking people way the hell over in central asia, far from any similar population, in 2k bc -- afaik, other western settlement didn't happen in the region until turkish muslims spread out that way in like 1300? it was really remote! but they lived there for a good two thousand years, being 6+ feet tall, red-haired, and blue-eyed, and making this bright and wonderful cloth. and though a few sources mention them, no one really interacted with them much, although i came across a theory somewhere that they had contact with shamanic cultures of the russian steppe, and that some remnants of their culture and bloodline survived in siberia until the 19th century. that seems kind of far-fetched, though.
oh dang it's A SHORT LIST OF ANCIENT CREATURES THAT ARE COOL feat your host inna in no particular order: 1. gorgonopsids: mammal-like reptiles that ate things. also ugly. (skeleton shown is for species inostrancevia alexandri). died in the PT extinction event. 2. xiphactinus: fish vacuum, apparently, as a fossil of it has been found with another (slightly smaller) fish inside of it. late cretaceous 3. dunkleosteus: dunk fish, my favorite. devonian placoderm fish, ate everything that it got near using those teeth. 4. pikaia: mid cambrian """fish""" that didn't even have a head. look at it. it's like a worm. BUT!!! this lil thing has the classifications of a vertebrate! 5. orthoceras: ordovician cephalopod, complete with shell. apparently there is quite a market for orthoceras fossils as healing crystals & all that? huh this concludes this brief list as i must sleep. most of these are marine bc i am a Sea Nerd. e. spelling...
My boss peeked into my office and said "hey guys, the JWST mirror is in its deployed position facing the observation window over in the cleanroom..." So of course my officemate and I dropped everything we were doing and booked it over there to get a look. Spoiler: EXTREME SHINY
also, now that i remembered that this thread exists: i decided to take a leap and email a researcher at my uni to ask about interning, or holding papers, literally anything to get my foot in the door. . . she does a lot of theoretical cosmology stuff which is SUPER COOL, so i figured why not give it a shot? well, it looks like its working out, at least a little, and im super fucking excited
you are the isopod party MC! sorry, it's just the first time i saw giant isopods was in a nature show about the deep ocean and there were like a dozen of them all scooting around cuz they sped up the action (cuz everything moves real slow down there) and it looked like a little underwater disco, and i haven't been able to stop saying 'isopod party' ever since
http://listverse.com/2016/07/01/10-freakishly-large-single-celled-organisms/ and here i thought the grape algae was the biggest one.
For anyone interested in the thing in genetics that nobody has stopped talking about for 3 years, CRISPR, you need to watch this video. This guy does acapella song parodies with different scientific themes. He's done quite a few, including the LIGO discovery, Alexander William Rowan Hamilton, and now CRISPR-Cas9.
I don't really remember the details of the episode anymore, but... sonar/seismography might work, it's what's used to detect oil pockets and mineral deposits. You'd need a lot of detectors and it wouldn't get amazing resolution, but if you knew roughly where to search, you could definitely detect a void. The problem with long wavelengths (and neutrinos) is that they'll pass through the rock and void alike, and not really give you much information. You need something that responds differently to different densities. (You'll get slightly different intensities based on how much material the beam passes through in total, but not by much, and there are a lot of confounding factors.) You could also try gravitational detection, the absence of mass would lead to a very small anomaly. You could probably do something like it, if not an MRI exactly. Magnetic anomaly detectors have been used in geological surveys and military detection for a long time, and an MRI is essentially an active MAD. ... okay, not really, but that's something like the concept. Basically, detect ferrous minerals and locate the empty area by their complete absence. You'd need to make a very durable and capable vessel that won't degrade after years of exposure to salt water, waves, and marine life. And then keep it reasonably cheap. And hope it never glitches out or happens to surface to recharge in the middle of a hurricane. Plus, communicating by radio wouldn't work particularly well underwater, you need very low frequencies, which means very high wavelengths, which means very big antennas. It'd be more reasonable to just use the sonar to communicate, perhaps at a lower frequency. It works for whales, it should work for drones, right? Also, I believe sonar is fairly power-hungry, so solar may or may not be enough? In any event you'll need high-capacity batteries that can sustain a large number of charge cycles. The drones also might get caught in fishing nets or something like that, which would be embarassing and probably make the fishermen in question a bit cross. Or they may just generally be a hazard to navigation, if they aren't clearly visible during the day. Plus they'll drift during their charge cycle and have to move back into position. It's far from unsolvable, but it's not an easy to solve problem and we don't really have a compelling need for high resolution charts of the deep ocean, since it seems that deep-ocean mining wasn't actually a thing. Meanwhile, in an actual contributory fashion, the trillion FPS camera developed at MIT is... a pretty amazing thing, and captures awesome images. Ever seen a wave rippling through one of those little boxes with obstacles in it? It's like that. But with light. Also, my random wikiwalk revealed the 1872 Expedition aboard the HMS Challenger, one of the first studies of the deep ocean, and which gave the Challenger Deep its name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_expedition I managed to unearth primaries in the wikipedia sources. Reading old scientific documents is often fascinating for me. http://19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/README.htm
this made me laugh v hard i hope you all appreciate engineering memes in actual science news, nasa's been working on flexible adaptive wings, & it looks like they may have made one! look at this thing right now it looks like it only applies twist to the wing, but i know one that changes the airfoil along the wing is in development, a professor of mine was working on it but couldn't get the skin to work with the change. the news article goes into more depth, but this is potentially huge for the aerospace industry! a twisted wing can be beneficial for say, landing, but then the same twist can be a hinderance for taking off, so being able to change it without changing the entire wing is great!
I'm very interested in how the Magic Space Can (EM Drive) seems to be going. I bet it's Space Pixies.
if I can drag us into subatomic particle physics for a second, scientists have discovered a quasi-imaginary geometric shape that both represents and simplifies subatomic particle collisions. Basically, it's a way to vastly simplify something that once took thousands of pages of calculations into a few lines of equations represented as a physical shape, the "amplituhedron" (which looks rad as hell and kind of gives me a headache from looking at it directly) THIS IS REALLY FUCKING EXCITING, YOU GUYS. MATH
is it bad that i have another engineering meme for that (that shape is Rad As Heck but hurts my brain)
