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milkisklim , in Has a vaccuum chamber ever been used for desalination?

Honestly there is never any shame about sharing what you’ve learned. I didn’t ever think about this and now I’ve learned something. Keep asking questions and searching for answers!

CaptainMcMonkey OP ,

I mean, my last question was about crapping my space pants, so maybe I shouldn’t aim too high, lol.

WalrusByte ,
@WalrusByte@lemmy.world avatar

I laughed pretty hard at this comment! Shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you’ll crap your pants among the stars!

Knuschberkeks , in Does a (phone|laptop) charger plugged in the socket but not connected to the device still consume electricity?
@Knuschberkeks@feddit.de avatar

They do consume a tiny little bit. I have a Measurement thingy that yoj plug between your outlet and whatever is plugged in which is accurate to 0.1 W. I tryed 3 chargers, one shows 0.1 W, the other two show 0.0 . I still know they consume a tiny bit, but less than 0.1 W is almost nothing. 0.1 W would come out to a consumtion of 0.876 kWh over a year, wich costs me 0.30 €.

SzethFriendOfNimi , (edited ) in Does Higgs exist in nature or is it merely artificially synthesized particle?

The way I understand it is that it’s a field just as photons are an excitation of the electromagnetic field.

Except that the Higgs interacts with some particles giving them “mass” where they otherwise wouldn’t.

So it “exists” in the sense that there is an all pervasive field that is interacting with other fields/particles.

PBS space time is a great channel for things like this

youtu.be/G0Q4UAiKacw

And here’s an easier intro to the topic

youtu.be/kixAljyfdqU

ubermeisters , (edited )
@ubermeisters@lemmy.world avatar

PBS space time, as user friendly as it is, constantly misrepresents the nature of reality for the convenience of explanation, just as a grain of salt. Not saying it’s a bad channel, just saying it’s supposed to be entry level.

SzethFriendOfNimi ,

Definitely. There’s always whole swathes of nuance and you have to do that. Even so I still find some of it hard to follow.

Similar to viascience. Great introductory material that gets harder and harder the deeper you go.

Which, to me, just speaks of the incredible depth of knowledge we have and astounds me that we figured out as much as we have as it gets less and less intuitive.

antlion , in Where is all the water going from climate change?

Climate change is moving water around, not creating or destroying it. Warmer air holds more water, so overall, the atmosphere can hold (and at times drop) more water than before. Permanent ice is melting as well, so that puts a bit more fresh water into the air and ocean. The water in the atmosphere is constantly circling the globe, forced largely by the rotation of the earth. Warmer temperature also makes for more evapotranspiration, so more fresh surface water is pulled into the air. But that same water will eventually fall elsewhere.

The sun is the source of energy that drives wind, rain, and evaporation. When you trap more of that energy with GHGs, it just turns up the volume for all of those things. There’s always seasonal and geographic variability, but the extremes increase because all those phenomena are solar powered.

Telorand OP ,

Cool, that's more of what I meant when I said "where is it going?" I didn't think it was disappearing; I more meant, "Where is it being stored or released?" Makes sense why there would be more of it when precipitation does show up, given that hotter air can store more.

I'm still curious, though, if certain local patterns are moving off to other locations. I'll have to look into that aspect, now that I kind of have an idea what to look for.

antlion ,

There’s been talk of some crops being able to be grown further north or south. But most of the weather patterns of a region are a function of proximity to ocean, predominant winds, and topography. It’s important not to confuse weather and climate. For a given drought or flood people may want to point to climate change as a cause, but it’s only going to amplify patterns that already existed.

dual_sport_dork , in If it were possible for some event to destroy the fabric of spacetime at the speed of light, could we still observe and be safe bc expansion?
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

We would not see it until (if) it hit us.

Observation cannot travel faster than the speed of light. No matter what it is you’re using to observe: Photons (light and radiation), measuring gravity, heat, anything. No matter if the phenomenon’s expansion were traveling at the speed of light, the changes to the universe being made as well as our ability to observe them are also traveling at the speed of light.

If the phenomenon were very far away, we would not be able to observe anything it was causing until its leading edge caught up to us. Then we would be destroyed at exactly the same time. This is because in your example it is expanding at exactly the same rate as the universal speed-of-light constraint allows us to receive any indication of its presence. Any evidence of, e.g. a far away star being destroyed would take X amount of time to reach us by its light no longer arriving. However, in that time the edge of the space-destroying phenomenon will also hit us, because it will also take exactly X amount of time to reach us, at the speed of light, from the point where the star was when it was destroyed. The distance is the same, the speed is the same. We would continue to receive light from that star in the meantime, as we already do. (The light from the stars you see in the sky now is already tens/hundreds/thousands/millions/etc. years old depending on the distance to the star in question.)

If the phenomenon were so far away that it is outside of our observable field of the universe, it will never reach us and we will never have any indication of its presence. That’s what “observable universe” means. Anything can happen anywhere outside of the observable universe and it is objectively meaningless to us, because we will never ever be able to reach it, record it, have it influence us in any way. This is, however, predicated on the theory of the perpetually expanding universe being true (which it probably is).

If you want to actually see the stars in your sky winking out over the millennia, I suggest building your universal destruction bomb such that its shockwave travels at, say, half the speed of light or some other suitable fraction.

j4k3 OP ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks, I was having trouble intuitively on that tipping point of expansion moving objects faster than the speed of light and how that is observed without more than lunch napkin level thought. Makes sense. We would never know about or see “the bubble” if it stopped short due to expansion.

TauZero ,

The best we can achieve in this thought experiment is to see through a telescope some faraway alien set up a bomb with a countdown timer that will surely blow up at a specific time in the future and destroy the universe, but which we’ll never see count down to zero or explode. If we saw it reach zero it would of course kill us in the same instant as we see it, because by the rules of the thought experiment the explosion travels at the speed of light. But if the alien is far away and the countdown is long enough, the accelerating expansion of the universe due to dark energy will carry it outside of our cosmic event horizon before it explodes.

Using the cosmic comoving distance definition and the cosmology calculator, the last scattering surface of the Cosmic Microwave Background for example is 45.5 GLy away. Its light was emitted 13.7 GY ago (400kY after the Big Bang) at redshift 1100z. I was told that due to accelerating expansion, we will never see galaxies further than 63 GLy away (we don’t see them yet, the matter that we’ll see form them is beyond the CMB sphere for us at present), and if we hopped onto a lightspeed spaceship right now, we can never reach galaxies beyond 17 GLy comoving distance.

So for example if we looked at a galaxy at redshift 3z which is 21 GLy away, and whose light took 11.5 GY to reach us, and saw the alien set up the bomb timer to 11.49 GY, we know that the bomb must have surely exploded by now, but also know that we are safe because it’s far enough away and we’ll never see it explode, even in the infinite future.

Similarly, we can relish the tiny shred of joy in the knowledge that if we did fuck up something really major, like creating a false vacuum bubble in the LHC or whatever, we can never destroy more of the universe than the 17 GLy bubble around us.

hmancuso , (edited ) in Is it worth closing the lid on a toilet before flushing?
@hmancuso@lemmy.world avatar

I think someone urgently needs to come up with one of these solutions:

  1. The foot-operated lid;
  2. The toilet with flush and suction;
  3. The Jedi throne (a Jedi-style toilet lid activated by hand movements) and lastly
  4. The Terminator (a time-activated flames of hell) solution. The time-activated mechanism locks the toilet door after the user leaves and burns the entire compartment at solar flare temperatures.
MrPoopyButthole ,

Jim Jeffries had a whole bit on his show about his idea for a foot pedal that lifts and lowers the seat, just begging for anyone to make it.

Some day I’ll buy a bass drum kick pedal and a 3D printer and make it happen.

I’ve only found one product that does this, it’s all plastic, very expensive, and the reviews are terrible.

hmancuso ,
@hmancuso@lemmy.world avatar

Jim’s a clever guy. We could even seek inspiration in some trash cans that have embraced the pedal idea. Can you believe we’re in the 21st century, surround by ai systems, risking extinction for various reasons, and unable to solve the toilet seat conundrum?

PastaGorgonzola , in How does a signing a post with a pgp key prove that you are actually the person behind the post?

What you are doing is exporting your key. Your public key is indeed something you can (and should) share as it enables others to verify that you are indeed who you claim to be (or more accurately, that you’re in control of the private key that’s linked to that public key). So while you should share your public key, your private key must remain private.

What these people on the dark web are doing is one step further: they sign their messages with their private key. This creates a cryptographic signature that’s different for each message (changing a single character in the message will generate a wildly different signature). Anyone with the public key can simply copy that message including the signature and validate it. If even a single character of the message was changed, the signature will not be valid. Thus ensuring others that the person who posted the message is indeed in control of the private key.

Signing is different from encrypting: while encryption renders your message totally unreadable to anyone without the correct key, signing doesn’t change the message itself. It simply appends a signature allowing others to check that the message wasn’t tampered with.

Brkdncr , in Can you get a sunburn from light reflected by a window pane?

You can get a burn from a reflection. There’s a building in Las Vegas that caused this problem due to its windows and angle towards the sun.

There are too many variables to say if you’ll get a burn though.

catloaf ,

Such as how much light is reflected, whether any windows have UV coating, how much exposure you get, and how susceptible you are to burning.

But it's possible.

half_built_pyramids , in Is climate change affecting weather forecasting?

Short version, there’s a model that predicts weather better, but it is kind of apocalyptic so no one wants to use it and acknowledge it.

youtu.be/4S9sDyooxf4

Boddhisatva ,

There are other reasons besides it being apocalyptic that climate scientists might consider the model less useful than others. This video rebuttal to the video you posted explains some of those reasons quite well. The rebuttal is from Dr. Adam Levy who is a climate scientist. I mention this only because Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, the maker of your video, actually has a degree in physics, not climate science. One should be very cautious when considering opinions of people who are speaking outside their field of expertise. While she may be an expert in her own field, she is not a climate scientist.

NounsAndWords , in Is there an insect that can devour plastic, breaking it down to less harmful components?

Bugs? I don’t know of any. Bacteria? It seems to come up again every few years.

Damaskox OP ,
@Damaskox@lemmy.world avatar

Cool!

Ideonella sakaiensis would be the name of the bacteria.

DessertStorms ,
@DessertStorms@kbin.social avatar

Bugs? I don’t know of any

Not sure if worms count as bugs, but, in the same way as the bacteria, there is an article about these every few years:
https://www.acs.org/pressroom/newsreleases/2022/april/earthworms-like-to-eat-some-plastics-but-side-effects-of-digestion-are-unclear.html

southsamurai , in Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

You can never, ever get a net gain from self cannibalism of any kind. Digesting takes energy, and you're also having to heal/replace whatever it is you're eating.

Besides, the amount of blood that will come from a pulled tooth isn't enough to do anything useful. You wouldn't even gain minutes from it if the source was external.

Skyhighatrist , in Where does pollution go when it rains?

AFAIK it ends up on the ground, and in the ground water. Which means that it could contaminate drinking water if it’s not treated properly. It will enter rivers and lakes, and snow and everywhere else that water gets.

catloaf ,

Yup. Raindrops originate from water vapor collecting around a particle in the air. When the rain falls, it pulls those air pollutants to the ground, where they either enter the ground or run down to rivers, lakes, or the ocean.

ConstipatedWatson OP ,

So pollution does indeed bind with water and gets carried around. I wonder how well chlorine helps destroy or clean such filth

catloaf ,

It doesn’t. If anything, adding something as reactive as chlorine to pollution would only make it worse.

Litron3000 ,

The rain that is falling today doesn’t end up in drinking water for a good while, depending on where you are. In the meantime it gets filtered by the soil it flows through.
On top of that not everything that’s unhealthy to breathe is unhealthy to eat/drink. Think about coal dust for example, very bad for your lungs but also a common medicine against diarrhea when compressed into a pill.
Just to give some perspective and lift you up a bit ;)

ConstipatedWatson OP ,

So we’re doomed, or rather, I am. Well, theoretically speaking we’re all doomed, but it would be pleasant to last as long and healthy as possible

Deebster , (edited ) in Does Higgs exist in nature or is it merely artificially synthesized particle?
@Deebster@programming.dev avatar

The Higgs boson isn’t an atom like plutonium, it’s “further down”. I think of it in levels:

  • atoms, which are made up of
  • electrons “orbiting” the nucleus, the nucleus being made up of protons and neutrons. In turn, protons and neutrons are made up of
  • quarks

Quarks are a kind of elementary particle called fermions, which are at the same level as bosons (and electrons). Down here it’s all weird and quantum but in an oversimplified nutshell, it’s not so much that they physically exist as that in the maths* we can treat them as existing which makes it easier to think about.

  • of the physics models we use

I’m a computer scientist, not a real scientist, so I stand ready to be corrected by those more knowledgable.

edit: @SzethFriendOfNimi is more knowledgable and helped me fix this up a bit.

Ziglin , (edited )

The fermions are particles with mass, an electron is already a fundamental fermion and not made up of quarks like protons and neutrons. The fundamental bosons (as far as I know) are particles that “handle” the interactions between other particles for instance gluons enable the strong force, while W and Z Bosons enable the weak force.

I believe the fundamental Higgs boson does occur in nature but likely immediately decays. (if I’m wrong I’d love to know how it actually enables certain interactions in nature)

Also I’m not studying quantum physics so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone needs to correct me. :)

Edit: clarified when fundamental fermions/bosons were meant.

Deebster ,
@Deebster@programming.dev avatar

That’s true… kinda makes a mess of my simple model 😅

I’ll edit in your correction, thanks.

rosss ,

Small clarification - the fundamental bosons are the ones that handle particle interactions, whilst fundamental fermions make up matter.

It is however possible to have atoms that are fermions or bosons depending on the total number (even or odd) particles that make them up.

Ziglin ,

Yup, should’ve clarified that I meant fundamental bosons, as any particle with integer spin is considered bosonic, while particles with half integer spin are fermionic, fundamental bosons alone still can’t make up matter though and protons/neutrons are fermionic.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres , in Are there other human traits like light skin which people developed to adapt to the "new" environment they settled in?

One more is that some people in the Himalayas (Nepalese, Tibetans, etc.) have some pretty recent adaptations for living at extremely high altitudes where there’s less oxygen. This Wikipedia article has more examples of recent adaptations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

Another interesting factoid is that Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world. So, don’t sleep on the fact that that Homo sapiens spent more time radiating throughout Africa than radiating out of Africa.

linucs OP ,

Super cool, thanks!

shalafi ,

I've read that people in Colorado have far more blood carrying capacity from the high altitude. Seems something one can develop.

CaptainPedantic , in Is the heat produced by fossil and nuclear fuel negligible?

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.

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