Science!

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Thad
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 02, 2016 11:32 pm

...
...I flossed every day for the four years I had braces.

With those goddamn loop things you had to use to thread it through the gap.

:fffffffffffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFF:

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Esperath
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Re: Science!

Postby Esperath » Wed Aug 03, 2016 1:21 am

"Might be" being the key words here. Existing studies were poorly executed, so we're somehow back to "absence of evidence" rather than "evidence of absence".
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Wed Aug 03, 2016 2:04 am

If nothing else, floss is still legit good at it's original purpose; getting out the crap that's stuck between your teeth better than toothpicks can.
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Wed Aug 03, 2016 10:11 am

Esperath wrote:"Might be" being the key words here. Existing studies were poorly executed, so we're somehow back to "absence of evidence" rather than "evidence of absence".


Right, I'm not actually going to suddenly stop flossing because of an article published in well-known science journal The Associated Press.

Mongrel wrote:If nothing else, floss is still legit good at it's original purpose; getting out the crap that's stuck between your teeth better than toothpicks can.


Yeah, there's one pair of teeth in the back corner of my mouth where chicken always gets stuck, and I've had cavities there. Even if daily flossing isn't as necessary as it's been depicted, flossing when you've got a big hunk of meat you can feel stuck between your teeth is clearly a good idea.

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Re: Science!

Postby Büge » Fri Aug 05, 2016 5:25 pm

Happy Birthday, Curiosity Rover!
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Re: Science!

Postby Büge » Wed Aug 24, 2016 8:21 pm

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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Sep 01, 2016 11:03 am

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Re: Science!

Postby Blossom » Fri Sep 02, 2016 1:50 pm

So the FDA has banned antibacterial soaps, on the grounds that the antibacterial components do nothing but make everything low-grade worse, individually and for the environment.
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Fri Sep 02, 2016 2:03 pm

Woah, nice!
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Re: Science!

Postby Yoji » Fri Sep 02, 2016 2:12 pm


There's a reason "rocket science" is synonymous with something very difficult, but it's still a real downer watching a quarter-billion dollars worth of technology go up like an ill-conceived KSP monstrosity.

TA wrote:So the FDA has banned antibacterial soaps, on the grounds that the antibacterial components do nothing but make everything low-grade worse, individually and for the environment.

I still remember Mrs. Ideal coming home from her nursing rotations, tearing her clothes off in the hallway, and jumping in the shower while muttering about MRSA. And before that, I was always under the impression that your body- your hands, especially- should be a microbial weed patch that snuffs out anything really bad.

So I think this is good news? I dunno, I'm not a doctor. I don't even heal in WoWcraft.
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Thad
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Sat Sep 03, 2016 12:33 pm

I've read that it's useful if you're about to perform surgery and you're washing your hands for several minutes as prep, but for absolutely any other circumstance it's no better than plain old soap.

It will, presumably, still be available to surgeons.

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Re: Science!

Postby patito » Sat Sep 03, 2016 4:59 pm

they said regular soap and water works fine for regular people and they will keep it available for doctors and other professions where it works as thad pointed out.

and no, you're not supposed to keep a "microbial weed patch" on your hands, just use fucking soap.

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Re: Science!

Postby Mazian » Mon Sep 05, 2016 12:25 pm

Philae comet lander photographed, by the Rosetta orbiter. Looks like it fell in between some rocks with hardly any exposure to the surface, so that does finally explain why communication was so hard.

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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Oct 20, 2016 4:47 am

Well, this might be really huge, if genuine and replicable: Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Lab claim to have discovered an easy, reliable process to convert CO2 directly into ethanol

A group of brainiacs at the famed Tennessee laboratory claims to have found an efficient, scalable way to convert carbon dioxide into ethanol at room temperature using common materials, potentially removing a serious greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

...

According to the journal ChemistrySelect, the scientists at Oak Ridge were thinking it would take a series of chemical reactions to convert CO2 into some kind of useful fuel, when they realized the first step was already producing fuel. Combining carbon/copper nanospikes on a silicon surface – "common materials," Dr. Adam Rondinone, one of the study's authors, told Popular Mechanics – refined CO2 into a type of ethanol with very few contaminants or side reactions.
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Re: Science!

Postby Sharkey » Thu Oct 20, 2016 1:29 pm

Taking bets on how long before the lead on this is kidnapped and taken to Zanzibar Land.
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Re: Science!

Postby Grath » Thu Oct 20, 2016 2:04 pm

I didn't pay too much attention to this, but my best friend's a chemical engineer and was talking about this before it started going everywhere. He said that this process is kinda expensive but might be some form of candidate for using excess electricity during low-load times?

Also that this isn't like a "reverse greenhouse gas effect" type thing but might be a "reduce CO2 emissions" thing.

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Re: Science!

Postby Cait » Thu Oct 20, 2016 2:49 pm


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Re: Science!

Postby Sharkey » Thu Oct 20, 2016 3:27 pm

Oh yeah, this came up before with the "artificial leaf" guy years ago. Last I heard I guess he found some investors in India. There are lots of ways of doing the same thing that could be coupled well with solar, and while it's nice to see more than one outfit reaching for, it's just hard to make it economically viable what with those pesky laws of thermodynamics. At best it's a possible energy storage and transport solution. No, this doesn't remove carbon from the system; that alcohol will end up burned again, not buried, but it does come out to a net zero if coupled with green sources in the first place, and can be used with a lot of our extant hydrocarbon infrastructure. If nothing else it would make for an excellent stopgap while teching up to something better. It's also something that science journalists have been oversimplifying and dangling in front of our nose for years. If they ever get the kinks worked out and find a niche for this it may already be obviated by other more efficient forms of energy storage and transport. Graphene or nanotube batteries/capacitors I'm looking at you.
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Oct 20, 2016 3:37 pm

Yeah, even the article I linked states that this may not be financially competitive with conventional ethanol production, but that it still has useful applications. Like making solar/wind/etc. much more viable by better using the downtime/uptime cycles. Or reducing atmospheric CO2 with a process that actually uses the CO2 as a resource to generate income, as opposed it just being a pure cleanup cost (i.e. a pure burden).

"We'll make gas out of dirty air!" is kinda bullshit, but those are both pretty big deals as it is.
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 26, 2016 5:02 pm

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