How will the decision to split the SKA between South Africa and Australia affect the science?

mepper · 22 days

I'd been hoping for ATHENA to be selected too - we need better x-ray telescopes! What sort of orbit was planned for it?

SteveD88 · 1 month

NICE considers a treatment cost effective if it costs less than £30k per life year saved. Assuming each killed service person has lost 70 years of life (an overestimate), that puts a value on human life of £2.1m. The total value of lives of service people lost is thus <£860m.

You can put a value on a human life, and those in power often have to.

throwaway_time · 1 month

Actually it looks like they've been invited by a private member's club, rather than the student union. Similar to the difference in Oxford between the Oxford Union and OUSU (Oxford university students union).

Aschebescher · 1 month

Though it's hard to imagine the British forming a guerilla army in the same way the Iraqis did

It's a lot easier to form a guerilla army when the occupiers aren't willing to take the more extreme steps to stamp it out.

Baldric88 · 1 month

They would stand a chance in Northern Ireland.

MIK136PARKS · 1 month

How is it made?

PowerDowner · 1 month

Actually the SI unit is Kelvin. If you go to centigrade on wikipedia you get a redirect with the first sentence 'Celsius, formerly known as centigrade'. You really can't get more wrong it seems.

PowerDowner · 1 month

It's really quite bizarre the mix here when you actually think about it. The roads and speeds are pretty understandable, since converting would be an immense job. You would probably have to replace just about every road sign in the country with ones that have metric and imperial. Possibly a good idea, but the cost in money, confusion, extra accidents, time lost etc probably isn't worth it in the short term.

But for other things it is weird. And it isn't just that the older population was taught imperial, and youngsters metric. I was taught metric, and I'm a scientist. I'm actually a fairly unusual scientist in that I prefer SI units to the weird ones used by convention in my field. Yet when I make my dresses, I will work in inches. Things get even weirder when you buy material - you can find yourself asking for 4 metres of a 60" wide cloth!

PowerDowner · 1 month

Eh, loads of people use Celsius. If you're doing anything serious you'll work in Kelvin, so it doesn't really make a difference.

koleye · 1 month

My priority would be Athena, followed by NGO. XMM-Newton is pretty good, but we always want better. There will also come a time when XMM-Newton will come to the end of its life, and its important to have a replacement so that we don't lose the capability to do X-ray astronomy.

I'm probably biased though, since I work in X-ray astronomy. The thought of a 500ks Athena observation of Ark564 makes me drool!

random-internet-guy · 1 month

Something I always wondered was where the gamma radiation went that got emitted when the primordial matter-antimatter annihilation took place and the tiny fraction of matter survived.

All the radiation will have been scattered by the ionised material that existed prior to recombination, and so gone towards heating the plasma. Once the universe expanded and cooled enough the protons and electrons recombined, and radiation was able to travel without scattering. The CMB is made up of photons that haven't scattered since the time of recombination.

vis-viva · 1 month

This has been one of the few really good in depth articles I've seen in r/space. Also thanks to the OP for posting the all-in-one version, rather than just the first of six pages!

mepper · 1 month

Wouldn't that be off the plane of the solar system, rather than the galaxy?

wordcolour · 1 month

That's a pretty awful headline. What's actually going on is that IBM is going to be involved in the computing infrastructure for the SKA.

nanuq905 · 1 month

These easy back-of-the-envelope violations.

Lets see the calculations then!

nomdeweb · 1 month

You can stick a small rechargeable battery in there. In fact, that seems to be what my current calculator has. It'll work fine if you cover the solar panel.

theancientofdayz · 1 month

Eh, that 4% figure isn't too meaningful in this context. Current technology is capable of directly detecting and studying 4% of the energy content of the universe. The rest is in the form of dark matter (which we may directly detect sometime soon, and can have already had some success at mapping), and dark energy, which we don't really have a clue about.

theancientofdayz · 1 month

I think that's more a comparison between the size of the universe as observed, and the current size of that volume after expansion is taken into account. The actual size of the universe is unknown, and current models put it as infinite.

anutensil · 1 month

a kooky little story about a misconception

I thought it was quite an interesting article that covered a fair bit of history. There was the fall of the Mali empire, and bit about the movement of trade routes, the motivations of early European explorers. I'm pretty sure that most people reading it learnt something.

windowpanez · 2 months

What does it mean for a company to own itself though? Who controls the shares that are bought back?

neondemon · 2 months

Different fields have different proportions. Fields where the research directly benefits industry are going to have industry funding. Fields like Astrophysics - not so much!

Actually_Downvoted · 2 months

The use of queer shouldn't be seen as a problem, as it had that meaning before it was applied to lgbt folks. It's a lovely word to use for a situation slightly out of the ordinary.

parlor_tricks · 2 months

It will take energy to break the bonds, and that has to come from somewhere. The lower the blade mass, the faster it needs to swing. Sharpness concentrates that energy, but there is a limit.

DrJulianBashir · 2 months

Without evidence of some sort you don't actually have a clue whether what you're saying is correct. Unless you have a knowledge of the behaviour of the chemicals involved, you aren't in a position to figure it out for yourself. It sounds like all you're going on is a belief that a 'completely natural state' is better than one in which chemicals are added. Since there is about as much reason to think that the added chemicals might make things better for your health than the converse, then you would indeed be a fool to make a claim one way or another.

Note: This isn't my field - I don't know whether or not it is the case that raw tobacco is better for you than the mixture commonly sold. I don't smoke, or really care one way or the other. I do care about people making scientific claims that aren't appropriate.

evrae

TROPHY CASE

evrae

TROPHY CASE

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