In terms of thematic similarity, sure.
But in terms of magnitude of the impact, microplastics aren’t nearly as dangerous as lead, asbestos, or cigarettes. Those lead to huge quality of life downgrades, and take decades off of a life.
A society that replaces cigarettes with ubiquitous microplastics exposure will still improve the population’s health outcomes, by a lot.
Also, it’s easier to throw a golf ball accurately than it is to throw a ping pong ball.
The big problem is that circles are special. Radians make sense in some sense, but also don’t allow a rational division of the whole circle, and so many real-world applications need a rational ratio that is an integer divisor of the whole way around the circle. 360° is pretty nice for that.
The advantages of metrication just don’t apply to circles. That’s part of the reason why metric time doesn’t work, either.
And, predictably, Americans will literally use anything before they use the metric system.
But what metric unit would you use instead of square degrees?
Sometimes the cost of processing itself is non-trivial.
Fermented sauces, for example, tend to be much more expensive than just the raw ingredients, because the process itself is complex (and requires significant labor and/or equipment to keep safe for human consumption).
In order to make some of these plant based meat substitutes, the complex processes need to basically move enough volume to be able to take advantage of economies of scale. So we’ll probably get there eventually, at least once these plant protein products become mainstream enough.
not because of its price tag
I get what you mean, and agree, but want to point out that at least in a sense, it is because of the price tag: the cost to the environment and to others, in the form of water use, land use, carbon and methane emissions, etc. Internalizing those external costs would make beef cost more money at the point of sale.
So if they move at nearly the speed of light, let’s say 0.99997 c, that’s 2.99783 x 10^8 meters per second.
Assuming that you’re standing exactly at solar midnight, exactly on the opposite side of the planet as the sun, and all 100 trillion neutrinos are coming from the sun and through your 1.8 meter height, each neutrino will be in your body for 6 x 10^-9 seconds.
So at any given moment, there should be about 600,000 neutrinos in you.
I’m pretty sure all those assumptions are inaccurate, but that’s the number I got.
Artificial selection has got to be possible, given we’ve done it to our fruit merely by happenstance over the generations. And our dogs, too.
No, I wasn’t clear. I meant for the “it” in my sentence to refer to biologically breaking down plastics, not to refer to artificial selection.
If, for example, wax moth caterpillars can break down polyethylene in small quantities in certain concentrations, then perhaps artificial selection can amplify that effect by expanding the range of concentrations that can be treated that way, or otherwise improving efficiency or volume of processing, etc.
No, but there is a great prize for any organism that figures it out and unlocks all that plentiful energy, especially if it encodes the “recipe” for future generations.
And that’s just natural selection. Artificial selection could possibly speed that up, too, if it’s actually possible.
Does this have any noticeable effects for the physics on the surface, at either the high or low points?
Sodium and water is… kind of spectacular:
But sodium ions and water are something we deal with on a daily basis, when we salt food. The characteristics of elemental sodium, as a metal, are basically irrelevant to discussing its safety as ions or bonded in molecules.
Yes, but this published finding is interesting because it reduces the steps.
Anyone can extract the elemental lithium from lithium cells, but it takes a lot of energy and harsh solvents and creates a lot of waste byproducts.
But extracting lithium iron phosphate (LFP) salts is much less energy intensive, if those salts can be reused. This paper shows that LFP can be extracted and then reused as an ingredient in creating LMFP, a cathode material with higher performance characteristics.
This is akin to using a technique to filter water instead of cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen and reconstituting the elements back as water.
The article talks about mass producing the enzymes themselves, not the life forms that produce the enzymes. It’s a key distinction.
Plus these organisms already live on this earth. They can’t outcompete other life on the surface, in less harsh conditions.
It sounds like you have no idea the magnitudes involved, or the timelines. You’re talking about something that took place over a period of 400 million years and whose effects (the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and our oceans) remain. There’s no chance that geoengineering would change the oxygen levels to anything we can’t handle, and if it starts to head down that direction we can easily handle it (just stop the processes that would sequester carbon).
It’s like being worried that your air conditioning is going to freeze your pipes in the house, in the middle of summer.
If we can get atmospheric CO2 back down to where it was 100 years ago that would be an amazing problem to have.
Read the article. They’re hoping to mass manufacture the enzymes involved, which have the following advantages over carbon capture through plant life:
The trouble with cow farts is the methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas that eventually turns back into CO2 in the atmosphere anyway. Concentrated methane sources tend to either be captured for use as fuel, or flared with a burning flame to reduce the greenhouse effect (at which point carbon sequestering might work). Less concentrated sources, like livestock farts, can’t really be dealr with in the same way.
That…sounds like they’re not actually sleeping those hours.
The part where the bull’s penis penetrated the donkey’s anus. There were 51 mountings, 34 of which resulted in penetration. There was lots of cuddling both before and after.
In contrast, attempts by the same bull to mount another donkey resulted in the other donkey actively resisting, and using tail movement and body movement to avoid penetration.
I don’t see how sexuality can’t be inferred from a penis penetrating a butthole. 34 times. Over the course of four days of observation.