This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.
Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.
Scientists worried by thousands of tardigrades crash-landing on the moon: ‘We have no idea what can happen’
The Beresheet lunar lander mission on April 11 was historic: Funded and deployed by Space IL, it was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and the first private landing on the Moon. Unfortunately for SpaceIL, things didn’t go as planned: Seconds before Beresheet (Hebrew for “beginning”) was supposed to land, it lost contact with the control room. During the braking procedure, the main engine stopped operating. By the time it was brought back online, it was too late for a soft landing and Beresheet crashed onto the surface. On board was a “lunar library” created by the Arch Mission Foundation as kind of time capsule for the combined knowledge of human civilization. The library contained samples of human DNA and 30 million pages of digital and analog data, including a full copy of Wikipedia, an Israeli flag, a Torah and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
It also housed thousands of tardigrades—microscopic eight-legged animals also known as “water bears.”
The public got a close-up glimpse of NASA's Space Launch System which will be used as part of its Artemis Project to send astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars starting in 2024.
Over the weekend NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine posted a video on Twitter showing the successful test of SLS' liquid hydrogen tank. The tank could withstand more than 260% of expected flight loads before rupturing.
According to reports, with the tank passing its test, the SLS has moved beyond the assembly and testing stage. The rocket, which is the tallest rocket to ever be erected, is 212 feet long which is equal to a 20-story building, While it is the most powerful rocket to be designed, reaching speeds that broke records, it has been mired in controversy. The development of the rocket has been delayed as costs have overrun estimates.
Nevertheless that didn't stop Bridenstine from calling the completed test at the Michoud Assembly Facility, which is located in New Orleans, a "very important day" for NASA.
SLS is the only rocket, at least for now, that can send Orion, NASA's moon rocket, astronaut and supplies to the Moon on one mission. The final five components of the SLS were secured in September. NASA has said that for the first mission of SLS and Orion, Artemis I, the rocket is capable of sending more than 26 metric tons (57,000 pounds) to the Moon. As the SLS evolves, it will be capable of sending more than 45 metric tons (99,000 pounds) to deep space. [Reply]
Statics was OK. Dynamics was a bitch though. That was the "Weed out those not actually serious in engineering" course when I was in school. Along with Differential Equations after Calc 1&2. The toughest ever for me though was Elements of Thermodynamics. Completely kicked my ass multiple times. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fish:
Statics was OK. Dynamics was a bitch though. That was the "Weed out those not actually serious in engineering" course when I was in school. Along with Differential Equations after Calc 1&2. The toughest ever for me though was Elements of Thermodynamics. Completely kicked my ass multiple times.
I loved statics and dynamics. Those were my favorite courses. I even took advanced dynamics as an elective and really enjoyed it. We had another course in materials that I liked a lot, too, where you looked at how materials bend and collapse.
I really wasn't into the chemistry-type courses, though, like thermodynamics and the basic chemistry courses. We had to take a circuitry course that was all I needed there, too.
I think I liked the courses where I could physically envision what was happening and wasn't into the courses where I couldn't. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Rain Man:
I loved statics and dynamics. Those were my favorite courses. I even took advanced dynamics as an elective and really enjoyed it. We had another course in materials that I liked a lot, too, where you looked at how materials bend and collapse.
I really wasn't into the chemistry-type courses, though, like thermodynamics and the basic chemistry courses. We had to take a circuitry course that was all I needed there, too.
I think I liked the courses where I could physically envision what was happening and wasn't into the courses where I couldn't.
I was pretty good at chemistry, despite me completely hating the entire subject. When I initially took college chemistry, they had a pre-test the first week, and anybody who passed the pre-test had the option to take honors chemistry, which was one semester of chem that counted at credits for chem1 and chem2 both. It was intense, but I got through it with plenty of work/study. But Thermodynamics though, that one was my Achilles...
My favorite courses were the programming/logic related ones. I was in a group robotics course where a team of 5 of us would write code that made a little robot act as a drink-serving butler in a crowd of people, using IR to scan the room and identify a person, then approach and offer a drink while maintaining safe distance, and retain which people in the crowd it had served/etc. Loved the programming and coding courses like that. At my time, I started with Basic, then Pascal, then C++. Nobody knows how to code these days though. Really tough to hire a computer tech with coding experience these days. [Reply]
Speaking of quiet, this is NASA's new supersonic plane that's designed to reduce sonic booms to sonic thumps. I'm not sure what it'll be used for, but it's aesthetically very pleasing. You drive that thing around town and you'll pick up all the hot chicks.
The world’s hottest pepper is currently the Carolina Reaper, clocking in at an average of 1.6 million Scoville Heat Units. The world’s hottest tomato? That’s still to be determined.
The current hottest tomato in the world is, of course, none of them, because tomatoes don’t make capsaicin, the chemical compound that gives hot peppers their kick. But, a group of researchers say that the bland red fruits (yes, they are technically fruits) could conceivably be genetically engineered to begin pumping out the scorching compound, due to tomatoes’ close evolutionary relationship with peppers.
You Say Tomato, I Say Hot Tomato
The two diverged around 19 million years ago, not that long, evolutionarily speaking, and the recent sequencing of the tomato genome revealed that they actually still possess the genetic framework to produce capsaicin. The relevant genes aren’t normally active, but with new genetic engineering techniques, researchers from Brazil and Ireland say that tomatoes could be tweaked to make the spicy compound once again.
Ah, the possibilities. Bruschetta with a kick. Pasta sauce that tingles. Fiery pizzas and eye-watering salads. The culinary potential of a hot tomato tempts the palate.
But, say the researchers in a paper published in Trends in Plant Science, the real reason for convincing tomatoes to get their fire on are more economical. Tomatoes are something of a workhorse crop. They grow bountifully and easily, and there’s a commercial and technical infrastructure surrounding them that makes tomatoes a safe option for agriculture. Peppers, on the other hand, are a bit more finicky. They don’t grow as readily, are more easily beset by pests and diseases and their capsaicin yields are highly dependent on the environment — that is to say, they lack the reliability that large-scale agriculture requires. Pepper yields average about three tons per hectare; tomatoes can crack 100 tons per hectare.
And capsaicin is in demand for more than just livening up bland dishes. It’s used in pepper spray and as a topical painkiller, and the varied commercial uses mean that a more dependable means of acquiring capsaicin would be advantageous. There’s no efficient way of mass-producing capsaicin in a chemical plant, so natural factories like peppers, and perhaps tomatoes, are the best option.
Spicing It Up
The researchers outline two methods by which this genetic manipulation could take place. Genes from a kind of bacteria that infects plants and has the ability to regulate their gene expression could be tweaked and inserted into a viral vector to reactivate the capsaicin pathway in tomatoes, or more conventional genetic engineering like the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to accomplish the same thing. There are still questions to be explored as to the efficacy of both techniques, but the researchers say they are fairly confident that any technical wrinkles could be smoothed over with further testing.
Tomatoes could be potentially altered in a few other ways to produce useful compounds, the researchers note as an aside. Lycopene, a compound found in tomatoes, could be reformulated during a tomato’s development with the addition of a few extra genes from other species. These subtle genetic reprogrammings could produce both bixin, a common color additive in both food and cosmetics, and beta carotene, an antioxidant.
Whether or not these genetic additions would affect tomato yield or quality is still unknown as well. The authors say in a statement that they are currently working on gradually deciphering how various genetic changes to tomatoes affect their ability to make capsaicin, with the goal of discovering the complete pathway. That would make hot tomatoes a real scientific possibility.
All that would be left to discuss is whether we want them or not. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Rain Man:
Speaking of quiet, this is NASA's new supersonic plane that's designed to reduce sonic booms to sonic thumps. I'm not sure what it'll be used for, but it's aesthetically very pleasing. You drive that thing around town and you'll pick up all the hot chicks.
The world’s hottest pepper is currently the Carolina Reaper, clocking in at an average of 1.6 million Scoville Heat Units. The world’s hottest tomato? That’s still to be determined.
The current hottest tomato in the world is, of course, none of them, because tomatoes don’t make capsaicin, the chemical compound that gives hot peppers their kick. But, a group of researchers say that the bland red fruits (yes, they are technically fruits) could conceivably be genetically engineered to begin pumping out the scorching compound, due to tomatoes’ close evolutionary relationship with peppers.
You Say Tomato, I Say Hot Tomato
The two diverged around 19 million years ago, not that long, evolutionarily speaking, and the recent sequencing of the tomato genome revealed that they actually still possess the genetic framework to produce capsaicin. The relevant genes aren’t normally active, but with new genetic engineering techniques, researchers from Brazil and Ireland say that tomatoes could be tweaked to make the spicy compound once again.
Ah, the possibilities. Bruschetta with a kick. Pasta sauce that tingles. Fiery pizzas and eye-watering salads. The culinary potential of a hot tomato tempts the palate.
But, say the researchers in a paper published in Trends in Plant Science, the real reason for convincing tomatoes to get their fire on are more economical. Tomatoes are something of a workhorse crop. They grow bountifully and easily, and there’s a commercial and technical infrastructure surrounding them that makes tomatoes a safe option for agriculture. Peppers, on the other hand, are a bit more finicky. They don’t grow as readily, are more easily beset by pests and diseases and their capsaicin yields are highly dependent on the environment — that is to say, they lack the reliability that large-scale agriculture requires. Pepper yields average about three tons per hectare; tomatoes can crack 100 tons per hectare.
And capsaicin is in demand for more than just livening up bland dishes. It’s used in pepper spray and as a topical painkiller, and the varied commercial uses mean that a more dependable means of acquiring capsaicin would be advantageous. There’s no efficient way of mass-producing capsaicin in a chemical plant, so natural factories like peppers, and perhaps tomatoes, are the best option.
Spicing It Up
The researchers outline two methods by which this genetic manipulation could take place. Genes from a kind of bacteria that infects plants and has the ability to regulate their gene expression could be tweaked and inserted into a viral vector to reactivate the capsaicin pathway in tomatoes, or more conventional genetic engineering like the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to accomplish the same thing. There are still questions to be explored as to the efficacy of both techniques, but the researchers say they are fairly confident that any technical wrinkles could be smoothed over with further testing.
Tomatoes could be potentially altered in a few other ways to produce useful compounds, the researchers note as an aside. Lycopene, a compound found in tomatoes, could be reformulated during a tomato’s development with the addition of a few extra genes from other species. These subtle genetic reprogrammings could produce both bixin, a common color additive in both food and cosmetics, and beta carotene, an antioxidant.
Whether or not these genetic additions would affect tomato yield or quality is still unknown as well. The authors say in a statement that they are currently working on gradually deciphering how various genetic changes to tomatoes affect their ability to make capsaicin, with the goal of discovering the complete pathway. That would make hot tomatoes a real scientific possibility.
All that would be left to discuss is whether we want them or not.
Chemists have found a new use for the waste product of nuclear power - transforming an unused stockpile into a versatile compound which could be used to create valuable commodity chemicals as well as new energy sources.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a radioactive by-product from the process used to create nuclear energy. With many fearing the health risks from DU, it is either stored in expensive facilities or used to manufacture controversial armour-piercing missiles.
But, in a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Geoff Cloke, Professor Richard Layfield and Dr Nikolaos Tsoureas, all at the University of Sussex, have revealed that DU could, in fact, be more useful than we might think.
By using a catalyst which contains depleted uranium, the researchers have managed to convert ethylene (an alkene used to make plastic) into ethane (an alkane used to produce a number of other compounds including ethanol).
Their work is a breakthrough that could help reduce the heavy burden of large-scale storage of DU, and lead to the transformation of more complicated alkenes.
Prof Layfield said: “The ability to convert alkenes into alkanes is an important chemical reaction that means we may be able to take simple molecules and upgrade them into valuable commodity chemicals, like hydrogenated oils and petrochemicals which can be used as an energy source.
“The fact that we can use depleted uranium to do this provides proof that we don’t need to be afraid of it as it might actually be very useful for us.”
Working in collaboration with researchers at Université de Toulouse and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Sussex team discovered that an organometallic molecule based on depleted uranium could catalyse the addition of a molecule of hydrogen to the carbon-carbon double bond in ethylene – the simplest member of alkene family – to create ethane.
Prof. Cloke said: “Nobody has thought to use DU in this way before. While converting ethylene into ethane is nothing new, the use or uranium is a key milestone.
“The key to the reactivity were two fused pentagonal rings of carbon, known as pentalene, which help the uranium to inject electrons into ethylene and activate it towards addition of hydrogen.” [Reply]
