Tritium doesn't concentrate like that. It's part of the water and chemically (nearly) indistinguishable from normal hydrogen, so life inside tritiated water won't preferentially accumulate it. At worst the concentration of in the body will be at equal with the surrounding concentration, and that holds all the way up the food chain inside any contaminated environment, so concentration isn't possible. Humans who eat seafood from that environment will get some tritium from the hydrogen in fish fats, but (again, at worst) the concentration will be that if the water, and humans only get a small amount of hydrogen (and therefore any possible tritium) from the food they eat. Lead and other heavy metals accumulate because they're not part of the normal biological cycle, so they stick around in the body. Tritium doesn't.

You're forgetting (or perhaps never realized) one of the fundamental tenants of fiction: depiction is not endorsement. That's true even if the depiction isn't obviously negative: Heinlein in particular likes to depict things from the perspective of characters who have found success and achievement within the world, so of course that character isn't going to view the world as bad. But that tells you absolutely nothing about what Heinlein actually thinks about, well, anything. Just taking The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers he'd have to simultaneously be a militaristic fascist and a libertarian anarchist.

His works aren't supposed to be saying "hey this is an ideal universe", they're about exploring things that might happen and the some of the consequences of those ideas. Like Starship Troopers, for example: he's not saying that citizen service is the optimal solution government rule, he's exploring a possible alternative to universal suffrage. That alternative has some good things about it (such as requiring citizens to be invested in society before they can vote), and some bad ones (for e.g. former military tend to all view the universe a specific, not necessarily correct, way). That's one of the things science fiction is about: exploring interesting ideas and concepts, not necessarily because they're good ideas, but because they're interesting ones.

Because claiming the 2020 election was stolen isn't prohibited? You're free to claim that all you want. You can even file dozens of lawsuits over the issue (though if you want to win said lawsuits, you'll need to, you know, actually provide evidence). What you're not free to do (or shouldn't be free to do, anyways) is call up a governor and tell him he needs to "find" a bunch of extra votes for you, or make specific defamatory claims about a voting company, or, you know, assault a nations capitol and threaten to hang the vice president if he doesn't do what he wants, while murdering a policeman in the process. Those are the things that aren't allowed.

That's because you're thinking about the users of Tether. Tether wasn't created because it's useful: it was created because it allows the company behind it to trade it's cryptocoin (worth nothing by itself) for actual money, under the guise of maintaining a financial reserve. This is, effectively, an interest free loan of billions of dollars. Best case scenario, the issuer can invest those billions and make huge returns (which is why even Tether itself admits that most of it's coin is not backed by cash, but by various securities). Worst case, the founders run off with the money to an extradition-free country (probably this will happen if/when the coin collapses).

Fundamentally this is the same way banks or Paypal or mobile payment systems make money: you give them money, which they can use in turn to make money. Difference is, those businesses all provide a useful (or at least convenient) service, and have extensive regulation and oversight. Tether has none of that. It's basically an unregulated bank.

Yes about the analogue part (the paper even explicitly refers to it as such), but it is a quantum system, so it would be something like an analogue quantum computer ("simulation" is the term used, since it's not reprogrammable without building a new device). Is this useful for developing more standard "digital" quantum computers? Maybe: anything that expands our understanding of interacting quantum systems is potentially helpful. And the ability to place precise quantum dots like this is very cool (though I don't know how new that part is).

The Minuteman missiles, at least, use solid-fuel rocket boosters, and those absolutely are under pressure during launch and will behave, well, poorly when they've got a hole in them. Other countries probably also use solid fuel boosters: they're just more reliable and stable than liquid motors. And the long-term goal of any ABM system has always been to hit the rocket during launch: MIRV systems (especially with decoys) make it very hard to destroy them reliably during or after reentry.

Also lots of rockets use moderately pressurized fuel: the space shuttle main tank, for example, used LOX and LOH at around twice atmospheric pressure. The tank required to contain pressure isn't terribly different from the tank required to support the weight of the rocket/propellant anyways. In fact pressurization can actually help by keeping the tank rigid.

Which is exactly what Matter is: it's an application-layer IP protocol that can sit on-top of various local transport layers (WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth) and allows otherwise unrelated devices to talk directly to each other, which potentially allows for e.g. an Apple speaker to control a Google (or generic) thermostat, without requiring any special Google-specific protocol support. So far, this doesn't exist. Every smart home system uses their own, largely unique, application layer, which means a smart-home hub needs to specifically and explicitly support that protocol (or talk to something that does), or they can't work together.

Now, after that, nothing prevents any of these smart devices from communicating with the Internet (or not), but that is up to the manufacturer: the protocol supports it, but doesn't require it. With a protocol like this, it should actually be a lot easier to make privacy-conscious devices: in theory you could roll your own on a Raspberry Pi with a microphone and speaker. The devices you buy can still snitch on you, but we might finally be able to be free from needing a central controller that does so.

Because it indicates that the ratio probably isn't random. If it was random, there is no reason it would be reasonably close. It is reasonably close, so there is likely some physical process that causes them to be connected. Anytime in physics our universe requires a physical parameter to take on a particular value (or a relatively small range of possible values, and compared to the set of all positive real numbers, 1 to 10 is infinitely small), it suggests that this value is not a result of random processes, but the result of some dynamical physical process that forces it to that value. For example, the photon is massless because the process of electroweak symmetry breaking forces it's mass to 0.

So, the way particle colliders work is by smashing together particles at very high energy. This energy allows the production of new particles, particles that are very massive and unstable, and which decay very very rapidly. Because these particles are unstable (and only produced at very high energies), they don't exist freely in the universe today (except in exotic locations, like supernova or near black holes). However, they did exist in large quantities in the early universe, when the entire universe had energies at (or higher) than that found in colliders.

Nearly all dark matter theories include some form of production mechanism that couples dark matter to more normal matter*. This allows some interaction between normal matter and dark matter (allowing for direct detection experiments to search for dark matter directly), and indirect astrophysical searches to look for signs of dark matter interacting with itself or other matter. The coupling between most everyday matter and dark matter is very small (or we would have found dark matter already), but it might be significant with the matter produced in particle colliders (because these particles have higher mass and energy, and so can decay and interact in ways everyday matter on earth cannot). So, the hope is, by producing lots of these particles, and looking at the results, we can see if we're producing dark matter, or at the very least eliminate some theories about how dark matter is produced. This is hard, of course, since you can't directly detect any dark matter produced (since all of the detectors are made of normal, low-energy matter with aforementioned weak coupling), but it's possible to look for what we're not seeing (missing energy searches), or we may see things we don't expect (indicating new processes) that can only be explained by dark matter production in the detector.

*This production mechanism is important to explain how dark matter came to be in the first place: it's theoretically possible dark matter and normal matter co-exist completely separately (only interacting through gravity), which is philosophically unsatisfying, but more importantly this production can explain the amount of dark matter in the universe. If dark matter was completely separate from normal matter, there wouldn't be any reason for the amount of dark matter to be anywhere close to the amount of normal matter. But they are fairly close: there's more dark matter, but only by a factor of 6 or so. If the dark and normal matter were unrelated, the quantities of both would be random, and they could easily be different by a factor of a trillion, or 10^1000, or anything. This would be a fine-tuning problem, and physicists like to avoid them (they're usually a sign of something we don't quite understand yet, rather than an actual thing). Instead, introducing a coupling allows for a natural production of specific ratios of dark matter to normal matter in the early universe. There are dozens of theoretical mechanisms for this (freeze-out, freeze-in, non-equilibrium decay, coherent field oscillations, etc.), and collider searches can help eliminate or constrain some of them.

Things like the W boson are very different from ordinary, everyday particles and matter. Everything you interact with is made up of 2 composite particles and 1 fundamental particle: the neutron, the proton, and the electron (respectively), the neutron and proton being made up of up and down quarks. Photons are also quite common in everyday experience.

None of the other bosons (such as the W boson in question) ever fully exist outside of particle detectors or high-energy physical events (cosmic ray showers, supernova, near black holes, that kind of thing). They're still relevant in physics (through virtual particle productions), though even there the W boson has fairly little everyday effect. You won't ever have a pile of W bosons just lying about. For one thing, a W boson decays after about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

And the qualities worth keeping were kept. Emails can still be as carefully considered and thoughtful as the creator wishes it to be. Blog posts similarly offer the same careful construction, with the added benefit of being available to the entire world (in the past, this would have only been available through print publishing of letters or op-eds or the like). Phones? They still exist, but video chat offers objectively superior instantaneous communication (with even better expression of emotion and reaction).

Current communication media doesn't sacrifice anything that existed in the past, unless you let it. Yeah, Twitter is a shithole. So maybe don't use it? Or use it to convey short simple ideas or quick news (you know, what it's actually okay at)? Yeah, chats are garbage at expressing emotions. So don't use it for that. We literally have dozens of communication media these days, many vastly better at one task or another than anything available in the past. Bemoaning the loss of x, y, or z from the "good old days" means you're probably not using these modern tools right, or don't understand them well, or are remembering the past with nostalgia (or, likely, some combination of all 3). Which, to be clear, is perfectly normal human behavior. It's why people try to conduct "debates" on Twitter, or use Linkedin to find dates. But the problem is, and always has been, people, not the new tools humanity has invented.

Actually, it was worse than the 1918 flu, compared to the 5-year average death rate. This only looks at total deaths, so the analysis is completely immune to any issues with classification or consideration of how people died: it tells us how many more people died than we expected to die. Could this have been due to chance? Sure. It would have been a pretty extraordinarily unlikely event, however, especially when it also happened in every other country in the world, and when the number of excess deaths and the number of deaths directly attributable to Covid-19 area very nearly the same.

Sort of. The "size" of the proton depends on the positioning of the quarks that compose it, which is constantly changing. In fact the individual quarks don't usually have a well-defined position, they're spread out over some volume following a distribution (this is the "wave" part of "wave-particle duality" in quantum mechanics). This distribution is larger near the center of the proton, and falls off further out. The measurement in this story is about the average radius of this volume, i.e. we measure the positions of the quarks inside and find they're usually contained a ball of 0.84 femtometers. However, the moment-to-moment size of an individual proton can be greater than this, or smaller than this.

If we were able to measure the positions of the quarks inside an individual proton (we can't, we only do statistical measurements of many protons), this wave distribution would collapse into a specific set of positions, which would fix the "size" of the proton momentarily, but only for a very, very, very brief time: the next measurement might find a significantly different size (again, we have so far only measured the average value of this size for protons, since we rely on huge sets of data using many many protons). So the "size" in the sense of the average radius isn't changed by the measurement (because that is a statistical average), but a measurement of a specific proton would cause that proton to take on a specific value temporarily, which in a sense "changes" the size from a distribution to a specific value.

The proton is not a fundamental particle, it's composed of quarks bound together with gluons. Quark-gluon interactions (which control its radius) are incredibly difficult to calculate (damned near impossible, in fact). The radius of the proton is not actually very important anyways: it's not a terribly meaningful quantity to begin with, since protons aren't hard spheres but a fuzzy miasma of gluon-quark interactions. The "radius" is defined as the root-mean-square distribution of the charge, which only has a small contribution to the physical behavior of the proton. The more important physical quantities of the proton, such as the total charge or the residual strong force interactions (which are primarily responsible for its contribution to chemical and nuclear interactions, respectively) aren't a function of this radius, except for minor higher order corrections.

This is almost a certainty in the sciences, since it has been proven to be true in mathematics. If this is an issue in mathematics, it is inconceivable that it is not also going to be true in physics. "Provable" is even worse, as the axioms (which exist in physics as they do in math) are by definition not things that are proven, but the beginnings you use to formulate proofs (or evidences).