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Blast me to the moons! Once you’ve learned how to tap nuclear energy, what can you do with it? One proposal was to take a couple thousand nuclear bombs, drop them behind a spacecraft, and set them off to push the craft from the Earth’s surface, into orbit, and then around the solar system. Called …
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Nuclear alchemy The medieval alchemists wanted to change lead into gold. It was, by the methods they were attempting to use, impossible, but modern physics might be able to turn gold into lead. it is possible to change one chemical element into another. In nuclear reactors, with all those neutrons flying about, materials that absorb …
It’s been several days since I noticed that my oh so very clever notion wasn’t actually a good one. I’ve been developing my little subleq creatures, called “figures,” layer by layer. There is one more layer to go, and I had what I thought was a brilliant way to implement it. That is, until I …
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Isotopes and enrichment A given element can have different numbers of neutrons. While the protons determine an elements chemical properties, the different number of neutrons can have different nuclear properties. Uranium occurs naturally with mostly u238, with only about 0.07 percent of it occurring as u235. It’s the uranium 235 that can support a nuclear …
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Let’s relax with nuclear physics I’d like to thank john peacocke for giving me the idea for the next few episodes. We’ve been chatting via email, and he told me about molten salt nuclear reactors. That reactor and the general subject are interesting, and they make a nice break from the if and maybe of …
I must make note of this mess before it leaves my head, and leaves me lost in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. I would shiver the whole night through. In the newly defined handler object, there are methods that get called when a figure is added to the realm. …
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Pulling the bone over their eyes The fossil record contains, at best, only a few percent of any given ecology during any given time. To complicate the picture, some of the fossils are fakes. From money to reputation to jokes, there are many reasons why such fossil hoaxes are perpetrated. Today we look at a …
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Digging for coal and fossils In the mid 1800/s some fossils were found in a tributary of the Illinois river, called “Mazon Creek.” They had simply weathered out of the ground, but it wasn’t until coal mining moved in, that the true extent and value of the Mazon Creek fossil deposit was discovered.
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Yesterday, I got email from the relevant companies. The smart glasses I ordered are on the way, actually shipped this time. This marks the end of a long, and quite Ludacris saga. I wondered just how long it really has been, so I took a look in the journal where I keep track of this …
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Fossil casts and molds When a creature dies and becomes buried, sometimes its remains can completely rot and dissolve away, leaving a hollow space within the rock called a mold. If that mold becomes filled with sediment and water, it can harden into rock, becoming a cast. Every so often, the same sort of process …