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Science (General/Chat)

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  • MTA bus-fare retreat could doom all NYC public transit

    11/02/2026 6:15:42 AM PST · by Libloather · 6 replies
    NY Post ^ | 11/01/26 | Post Editorial Board
    It looks like Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s getting a wish-granted monkey-paw style: MTA buses are now de-facto free — at the price of making them increasingly dangerous and blowing a disastrous hole in the agency’s finances. Not to mention the larger consequence of surrendering to farebeating. MTA chief Janno Leiber last week suspended the EAGLE fare-verification program after a couple of ugly incidents, presumably under political orders not to upset the anti-policing left. And NYPD flacks say the cops have “no plans” to step in; officers haven’t been issuing more than handful of farebeating summonses for some time, and the city’s...
  • LATENCY PROBLEMS AND FIXES

    11/02/2026 3:30:34 AM PST · by maddog55 · 14 replies
    Geeks for Geeks ^ | 23 Jul, 2025 | Geeks for Geeks
    Hoping FR will take the hint... Latency, in the realm of technology and network communication, is a critical factor that influences the time delay between input and output. This article explores the concept of latency, its real-world implications, common reasons for latency, and methods to reduce it. Whether you're a gamer, a streamer, or simply looking to optimize your internet experience, understanding and managing latency is key to a smoother digital journey.
  • 3,000-Year-Old Gold Pendant Unearthed in Extraordinary Find | Great British History Hunters [14:06]

    11/01/2026 5:03:09 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 14 replies
    YouTube ^ | June 23, 2026 | Journal - History Documentaries
    With behind the scenes access at the British Museum, this series follows passionate metal detectorists as their incredible, and often valuable, discoveries make their way through the fascinating world of the museum's Portable Antiquities Scheme. 3,000-Year-Old Gold Pendant Unearthed in Extraordinary Find Great British History Hunters | 14:06 Journal - History Documentaries | 157K subscribers | 70,522 views | June 23, 2026
  • Three earthquakes strike California overnight along the San Andreas Fault

    11/01/2026 1:35:18 PM PST · by Libloather · 29 replies
    NY Post ^ | 11/01/26 | Justin Choi
    Three minor earthquakes jolted across California overnight right along the San Andreas Fault. The quakes registered in the mid-magnitude 2 range across Northern and Southern California on Sunday. A small 2.7 magnitude earthquake was detected in Petrolia at around 4:31 a.m., followed by a 2.6 magnitude shake in Santa Barbara near 4:39 a.m, according to a USGS Latest Earthquakes Interactive Map. Westley was also rattled with a magnitude 2.5 quake on Saturday night. The red lines on the interactive map represent major tectonic plate boundaries across the world, with the line through California tracing the San Andreas Fault.
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day - Colors of the Moon

    11/01/2026 11:58:36 AM PST · by MtnClimber · 12 replies
    NASA ^ | 1 Nov. 2026 | Credit & Copyright: Marcella Giulia Pace
    Explanation: What color is the Moon? It depends on the night -- and the time. Outside of the Earth's atmosphere, the dark Moon, which shines by reflected sunlight, appears a magnificently brown-tinged gray. The featured image highlights a collection of apparent colors of the full moon on Earth, documented by one astrophotographer over 10 years from different locations across Italy. A red- or yellow-colored moon usually indicates a moon seen near the horizon. There, some of the blue light has been scattered away by a long path through the Earth's atmosphere, sometimes laden with fine dust. A blue-colored moon is...
  • The Remarkable Find Of A 1,000-Year-Old Sword | Great British History Hunters [12:37]

    11/01/2026 6:05:04 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 21 replies
    YouTube ^ | August 9, 2026 | Journal - History Documentaries
    A historian makes a stunning discovery -- a 1,000-year-old sword buried for centuries. This rare find offers a glimpse into a forgotten past and could reshape what we know about the era it came from. The Remarkable Find Of A 1,000-Year-Old Sword Great British History Hunters | 12:37 Journal - History Documentaries | 157K subscribers | 351,181 views | August 9, 2026
  • We Need to Talk About Uranus

    10/31/2026 6:34:17 PM PDT · by BeauBo · 11 replies
    YouTube (The Space Race) ^ | July 4, 2026 | The Space Race
    On the surface, Uranus looks calm. And yet, we've suspected for a long time that inside there must be something very weird going on. So, in 1986, when NASA was finally able to probe Uranus for the first time with its Voyager 2 mission, what they found was nothing short of incredible. While most people probably think that Uranus is filled with gas, we are now realizing that it's actually full of something massive - a strange combination of forces that appears to defy all logic. And it's taken NASA scientists more than 40 years just to get to the...
  • We Need to Talk About Uranus

    10/31/2026 6:34:17 PM PDT · by BeauBo · 55 replies
    YouTube (The Space Race) ^ | July 4, 2026 | The Space Race
    On the surface, Uranus looks calm. And yet, we've suspected for a long time that inside there must be something very weird going on. So, in 1986, when NASA was finally able to probe Uranus for the first time with its Voyager 2 mission, what they found was nothing short of incredible. While most people probably think that Uranus is filled with gas, we are now realizing that it's actually full of something massive - a strange combination of forces that appears to defy all logic. And it's taken NASA scientists more than 40 years just to get to the...
  • Father Tongue, Mother Land: The Birth of Languages in South Asia by Peggy Mohan (2025): A Review

    10/31/2026 2:06:42 PM PDT · by Cronos · 3 replies
    Doing Sociology ^ | 3rd July 2025 | Kislaya Priyadarshi
    Peggy Mohan’s new book Father Tongue, Mother Land: The Birth of Languages in South Asia (published by Penguin Random House in 2025) can be seen as a sequel to her earlier work Wanderers, Kings and Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages (2021), where she explored the development of languages in India while looking into the waves of migration of ‘men’ into the subcontinent from the ancient times. In her new work, Peggy is looking into a more remote past to get to the root of the modern Indian languages. Peggy Mohan sketches a historical picture of the emergence...
  • Putin's Giant Nuclear Missile EXPLODED in Its Own Silo... Satellite Photos Show a 60-Meter Crater

    10/31/2026 1:54:11 PM PDT · by adorno · 88 replies
    The War Briefing ^ | 10/30/2026 | The War Briefing; You Tube
    Is the world in danger with Russians incapable of handling their own nuclear missiles?
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day - Night on a Spooky Planet

    10/31/2026 1:12:10 PM PDT · by MtnClimber · 7 replies
    NASA ^ | 31 Oct. 2026 | Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrées)
    Explanation: What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth on a dark and stormy night, of course. The ghostly scene was photographed at Hverir, a geothermally active area found along northeastern Iceland's volcanic landscape. Triggered by solar activity, geomagnetic storms have unleashed energetic particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field. Penetrating the planet's upper atmosphere at high latitudes, the particles create auroral displays in the starry night sky. Ghostly towers of steam and gas are venting from local fumaroles to dance against the eerie, greenish northern lights. For now, auroral activity on planet Earth remains in a high state as the Sun...
  • How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine

    10/31/2026 11:20:20 AM PDT · by E. Pluribus Unum · 33 replies
    The New York Times ^ | Oct. 31, 2026Updated 1:32 p.m. ET | Christopher FlavelleIrena HwangAdam SellaAlan BlinderSheryl Gay StolbergBenjamin Mueller and Michae
    The system that has driven life-altering discoveries and helped make the United States a superpower is now under intense strain.The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be...
  • 9,000-Year-Old Workshop Uncovered in Turkey

    10/31/2026 10:37:59 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 22 replies
    Archaeology Magazine ^ | October 23, 2026 | editors / unattributed
    According to a Türkiye Today report, green malachite and copper has been uncovered in a 9,000-year-old workshop in a Neolithic settlement in southeastern Turkey. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said that the pieces of raw and worked malachite, copper beads, and other copper objects were found in the workshop, which has a stone-paved work area. Six postholes were found around the edges of the area, suggesting that it may have been covered by a canopy. "The discovery shows that the mining tradition here continued for about 2,000 years and that specialized production activities took place in specific work...
  • Wheel Ruts in Malta Analyzed

    10/30/2026 5:14:33 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 15 replies
    Archaeology Magazine ^ | October 22, 2026 | editors / unattributed
    Analysis of deep grooves in the bedrock on the islands of the Maltese archipelago suggests that they are ruts made by the wheels of carts over thousands of years, Gizmodo reports. It had been suggested that the tracks dated to between 5200 and 750 B.C. and were related to quarrying activity. Joel Grima of the University of Malta said that similar cart ruts can be found in urban areas of Europe, Asia, and North America. In Malta, more than 2,600 tracks totaling more than 30 miles have been recorded. Most of the tracks are in clusters, and some of them...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day - Haunting the Cepheus Flare

    10/30/2026 2:35:18 PM PDT · by MtnClimber · 6 replies
    NASA ^ | 30 Oct. 2026 | Credit & Copyright: Mirko Tondinelli
    Explanation: Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula. It lies at lower right in the starry field of view. Inside the Ghost Nebula are reddish...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day - The Horns of Venus

    10/29/2026 12:00:48 PM PDT · by MtnClimber · 10 replies
    NASA ^ | 29 Oct. 2026 | Credit & Copyright Thierry Legault
    Explanation: That's no moon. But you could be forgiven for thinking it was a crescent Moon in the sky. It is a lesser known fact that Venus also has phases. (What about other planets?) The featured image shows Venus seen almost directly between the Sun and the Earth. This happens once every year and a half, and it is like the alignment that happens every month during a new Moon. But the new Moon is dark, while Venus' backlit atmosphere refracts and scatters the sunlight, creating a glowing crescent arc that extends beyond 180 degrees: the tips of this arc...
  • On El Hierro Island, At Least They Kept The Diesel Backup

    10/29/2026 5:33:41 AM PDT · by MtnClimber · 15 replies
    Manhattan Contrarian ^ | 26 Oct, 2026 | Francis Menton
    On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant. The relevant statistics for El Hierro are: average electricity demand: 5 MW; nameplate capacity of the wind turbines: 11.5 MW (i.e., 2.3x “overbuild” compared to average usage); storage capacity of the pumped storage system: 70 MWh (i.e., 14 hours of average usage). The operator of the facility has provided eight years of operating data for the system. I reported on the results in my last post on October 23. In summary, the wind/storage system provided...
  • Protein Fibers, a Hallmark of Alzheimer’s, Spotted Making Deliveries to Sperm

    10/29/2026 3:22:14 AM PDT · by tired&retired · 16 replies
    Columbia's Zuckerman Institute report ^ | October 26, 2026 | Columbia's Zuckerman Institute
    Unexpectedly, a kind of protein that is usually linked with diseases in the brain may play a vital role in semen, helping shepherd genetic material into sperm cells, scientists at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute report today in the research journal Molecular Cell. Dr. Fitzpatrick, an expert on amyloids in brain research, wondered if those fibrils could also help materials naturally in the body enter sperm: specifically, the genetic molecule RNA, which helps turn instructions encoded in DNA into protein molecules. Scientists knew that seminal fluid contains lots of small RNAs, thought to play a major role in what genes are active...
  • Ugandan serial cannibal butchered, ate 38 people over 15-year reign of terror, general claims

    10/28/2026 7:34:26 PM PDT · by Libloather · 37 replies
    NY Post ^ | 10/28/26 | Jared Downing
    Soldiers in Uganda caught an alleged serial killer cannibal who is accused of killing and eating 38 people over his savage 15-year spree, authorities said. Mujurizi Moses is the “worst serial killer and cannibal in Uganda’s history” who devoured body parts of dozens of victims victims between 2010 and 2025, the country’s defense chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba alleged on Monday. The machete-wielding maniac is accused of slaughtering a pastor and his family, a witchdoctor, eight of his own relatives, and an elderly woman hacked to death in front of her two grandchildren, according to the Daily Monitor, a Ugandan outlet....
  • Have we been wrong about the location -- and the nature -- of Odysseus' homeland for 2,000 years? [13:50]

    10/28/2026 5:48:17 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 13 replies
    YouTube ^ | October 28, 2026 | Honor Cargill-Martin
    Have we been wrong about the location -- and the nature -- of Odysseus' homeland for 2,000 years? | 13:50 Honor Cargill-Martin | 11.1K subscribers | 6,968 views | October 28, 2026 Alas, no YT transcript available.