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[Starver]

Additional possible problem: In the event of an impact/flame-type accident that you're probably thinking of avoiding, your metal-foam is almost like metal-shavings, and might well be if it is fragmenting when the problem arises. Also its natural conductivity might be troublesome. Both with heat and electricity.

(And if you're manufacturing in an inert environment to prevent oxidation - not sure if that's what you intend - and then it gets damaged enough to let oxygen in (and the trapped hydrogen out), it might be even worse for the structure...)

The old chestnut, however, is that a vacuum won't burn. Build a giant self-supporting (and damage-resistent) metal sphere, strong enough to entirely evacuate. How to do that (and how utterly impossively huge it would have to be) I leave as an excercise for the reader.

[delphonso]

Two cool science things from the past week or so:

Fusion ignition almost achieved through the laser induced method. This is a big advance toward reliable fusion for research and potential energy purposes. I think this youtube video a friend found explains it well - although some of the "hurdles" are a bit silly.

Golden Rice finally starts getting used. Golden Rice is a GMO fortified with vitamin A. It was opposed by Green Peace and a bunch of other organizations despite being an amazing example of a company doing the right thing. The holder of all the patents has declared Golden Rice free for any and all humanitarian purposes, meaning you could probably whip up a charity and start distributing seeds in a weekend if you know a good notary.

Two great science news articles that made me feel very optimistic.

[Telgin]

It's frustrating that even with this advance in fusion power we're still decades away from a commercial reactor.  I fear that the laser confinement method may never be more than a scientific curiosity compared to toroidal or stellarator magnetic confinement methods since it's hard to imagine a reaction vessel that would allow the pellets to be dropped into a position to be ignited while not fouling up the process for the next pellet.  I don't know what the forces are like from the result explosion, but I suspect that even small forces make it hard to keep the lasers aligned with sufficient precision, and debris or gases released would probably be opaque to the next pulse.

Not to mention the difficulty in actually tapping the resulting heat for generating power.  I'm curious if anyone has even solved that problem for magnetic confinement reactors.

[Starver]

The joke is that we're always a couple of decades away from practical fusion power.

(And that joke itself is a number of decades old... in the '70s it was already an old chestnut, and the castanea has itself never been rejuvinated since.)


That said, I saw about that the other day, and it is a definite step towards the ultimate goal.

(Not quite Mr Fusion level of utility, of course. And once you get to actual practical over-unity with the experimental apparatus, you still have to convert that expertise into creating the first facility to properly pump energy back into the grid and get on with tweaking or even revamping the process in your initial custom-built research facility and any now more potentially lucrative copies that arise. But gives you the ability to think about it.)

[delphonso]

Having an additional method to reach fusion reliably gives the entire industry another path to figure out solutions for. No clue if this will just be a curiosity, but it certainly helps with the march toward fusion power - no matter what.

[Naturegirl1999]

I’m trying to make an RNA strand and a DNA strand in an app I got, and O learned bout various nucleosides in the process, apparently we’ve made synthetic ones as well

[Iduno]

I’m trying to make an RNA strand and a DNA strand in an app I got, and O learned bout various nucleosides in the process, apparently we’ve made synthetic ones as well

I do *not* remember enough Organic Chemistry for that.

[Starver]

It has long been at least a smattering of interest in Unnatural Base-Pairings. For reasons varying from the investigating of why the current four (or five, across both DNA and RNA) bases appeared to be the core alphabet, to that of allowing the cultivation of novel organisms that you could life-limit (e.g. if they ever escaped the experimental containment) by failing to give them access to the strange-base they now need.

A minute's thought will spring up a half dozen or so Jurassic Park-esque "Life will find a way" possibilities of why rhe answer to one could overtirn the surety of the other...


Yes, that's usually couched more in terms of nucleotides than nucleosides, but I think they're trivially synthesised between (of equivalent sub-brands).


Apart from being vaguely possible (and apparently put through at least partially practical experimentation) I'm not sure if they've yet gone full-blown movie-plot and/or made-of-phlebotinum in a significant way. Which might mean you (NG) and your remodelling of life's building bricks might be doing groundbreaking work... Good luck, and try not to unleash some weird chimeric monster-slash-microbe-slash-monstrous-microbe-slash-microbial-monster creation upon us all!

[Naturegirl1999]

It’s an app, I don’t have actual gene making tools yet/ also the app crashed when I tried using it t0 look at electrostatic potential or density, so I turned the deoxyribose into ribose and tried pairing them all up together to make an RNA strand, still crashed. Apparently 4 bases is too much for the app to calculate. I have been wondering if it would be possible to like turn glucose into nucleotides but I’ll need a source of phosphate for that. Also nutrition facts don’t like going into detail on what their ‘natural and artificial flavorings and colors” are chemically, do ground up coffee beans still contain DNA/RNA maybe? I don’t have what’s needed to extract either, so I’ll have to find out how many bases the app can calculate, so far it can do at least 2, I’ll have to check if it can handle 3, if so, I’d be able to see electron density or electrostatic potential of codons. Sorry for the like 3 or 4 topic changes, at least they were related somewhat

[Starver]

For general interest, though (as I write this) this year's winners aren't listed on the summarising page, just yet, the 2021 Ig-Nobels have been awarded (and can be watched - but I've not done that yet) and there are some interesting ones among them. (The Physics and Kinetics prizes sound interesting, both of them, and may be worth incorporating their results in a little simulation I've been trying to do... )

The soɹǝɔouᴉɥɹ experiment (given the Transportation award) sounded like fun to do!

[Naturegirl1999]

Thank you, this was interesting

PEACE PRIZE [USA]:
Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier, for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face

Iwonder how they tested this…

[delphonso]

Having an additional method to reach fusion reliably gives the entire industry another path to figure out solutions for. No clue if this will just be a curiosity, but it certainly helps with the march toward fusion power - no matter what.

Well, some progress was made already on the other, more-realistic, method of obtaining commercial fusion.

New superconductive high-temperature magnets make the size of these projects much more reasonable. The team had a clever strategy - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Basically just introduced the better magnets into an already successful model. The new magnet (in a stack of 16 of them) reached 20 tesla - which is apparently record breaking.

[Starver]

There was also this, a few months back (related to the above effort, at least in type of effort being designed for).

Baby steps, picking our way, these ways and more. (But still a way to go, and the paths ahead probably having a few mis-steps and difficult terrain to forge through.)

[delphonso]

I love the way the tokamaks look. It's like how I imagined sci-fi ship engines would look.

Undoubtedly hurdles will present themselves. I'm.not sure if I'm just following the story, but it seems like they've been knocking down a few hurdles lately, and it's good to read some positive science news that isn't just...telling people not to drink bleach.

[Bumber]

Well, some progress was made already on the other, more-realistic, method of obtaining commercial fusion.

The sun in a bottle

The sun? The sun in a bottle?