Actually, the UW surgical robot is the one you see in the space training sequences of certain SF movies. Ender's Game specifically.

It actually exists.

It's hard enough to be scratchproof to the vast majority of things we encounter in our daily lives. Once you're harder than quartz and tool steel, there's not much you'll encounter in normal circumstances that can scratch you.

It's really not the spinel aspect that I find neat. It's the blurb about their process. They say they got it to work by two things: one, extreme purity (no surprise there), and two, mixing. No matter how well you try to mix fine powders together by any normal means such as shaking, you're never going to get a perfect mixture where all of the particles pack down together to their optimally dense arrangement. Apparently they've come up with a process that allows just that (they don't go into details).

Well, that's worth far more than spinel. Cheap and scalable production of materials comprised of perfectly arranged microstructures? It seems like such a thing could things in every field of materials science, from batteries to superconductors.

If, that is, it lives up to how the article makes it sound. TFA is rather high on hype and short on details.

The problem Apple had is they wanted the entire front to be sapphire, but with holes for the buttons and such, your phone has the screen protected but nothing protruding through the crystal which makes it almost infinitely easier than what Apple was trying.

As an example, it's very hard to get any MDs or nurses in some of the emptier remote parts of WA, BC, and ID, and at times, even if you could drive it, it's 50-100 miles to the nearest hospital over mountain passes with a heck of a lot of snow where I grew up. Some days the highway won't reopen for a week.

So something like this is way more important than you might realize.

Links aren't that fragile in many of these remote areas, as a lot of our power generation is going on there, so you can piggyback on the transmission line power at very high communication rates, but sometimes you can't even fly there, and the surgery is needed ASAP.

I'm familiar with the Microchip implementation. This is a 300-MHz-class 32-bit processor. Not particularly modern and not really fertile ground for R&D.

We did have two or three suggestions from commenters of open MIPS processor implementations, some of which are more modern. One uses a proprietary high-level HDL, which I haven't investigated.

Everything else in KSP has had months of testing (perhaps even years) and they change fundamental things like the aerodynamics model without letting it be tested by the established community?

But isn't that so in the Kerbal spirit? ;) Hmm, what's the coding equivalent of forgetting a ladder? :)

Yeah, the old aerodynamics was pretty horrible. Add a nosecone to your blunt-tipped rocket and it increases the drag? What kind of logic is that? It needed to be fixed.

There's a couple balance issues I'd like to see fixed, mind you. For example, it's possible to make small solar ion-powered aircraft in Kerbal. But only small ones, because all of the ion engines available are tiny, and all of the fixed solar panels are tiny, so while technically it's possible to make bigger craft, the necessary part spam makes the game unplayable. Fuel for ion engines is also absurdly and unrealistically expensive for no obvious reason. Yet solar panels and RTGs produce orders of magnitude more power than they should for a given size, if ion engine power to thrust ratios for a given ISP are used as the baseline.

Drop xenon costs, tweak power production / consumption for existing hardware, and add in nuclear reactor power sources (after all, they have nuclear rockets, we know kerbals understand nuclear physics), and and you could balance that out pretty well in terms of both gameplay and at least slightly more approaching realism.

(Note that one may be tempted to say that the ion thrusters are far too high power, but at least that's plausible if we assume that they're MPD thrusters with some type of advanced cooling system - you can get crazy power to weight ratios (by ion standards) out of MPD thrusters if you could somehow supply them many megawatts of power and dissipate all the waste heat - they manage it in pulsed mode, at least. But Kerbal's solar panel area-to-thrust ratios at the given ISP are not even close to being compliant with the laws of physics)

I found the commenter who posed this as a response to RISC-V interesting. The University of California at Berkeley has a completely public implementation, under the BSD license, without patents filed, which your effort appears to be positioned against.

It is a time-limit on damages, which is not the same thing as a time limit on lawsuits. There is still the potential to restrain an infringer who started 6 or more years ago from further infringement through the courts - and totally kill their business - even though damages for the infringement can not be recovered. And you can sue any other infringer.

I love how true that all is. You have Musk making Kerbal references in his tweets. I've seen engineers from SpaceX doing likewise. I was once chatting with a researcher working on a Titan probe concept and he responded at one point with something like, "Well, like what one experiences on Eve in Kerbal Space Program...."

The development team really should be proud.

Thank you, but I said nothing about calories. Did I? I don't see it anywhere. I commented that a sugar SUBSTITUTE actually has more sugar than substitute in it.

By mass only, but thats a complete red herring since you use far less of it than you would of actual sugar.

Nobody is ever going to make a mass-market pure Stevia product because it's way too hard to use - it's just way too concentrated of a sweetener. Trust me, I've used it, I usually have to resort to weighting it out on a jewler's scale. It's silly to point out small amounts of sugar filler; for a given amount of sweetness you'll never consume a significant amount.

They could use something else that wasn't a digestable carb instead.

No, people like you and "food babe" would freak out at the names of indigestible carbs far worse than you do with dextrose. And dextrose won't alter the texture or flavor of the food product like many indigestible carbohydrates such as resistant starches would.

I was talking about ingredients in Stevia products; she has the documentation.

She has a page full of claims, half of which are laughable BS that she just made up, as is her typical modus operandi.

Right. Ok. Whatever. I don't think I told you to believe everything she's ever said, did I?

You're the one who linked to a running joke, its your problem.

I just gave you a link to a peer-reviewed study which studied its breakdown components in the bloodstream and you're still claiming otherwise? Tsk tsk. And to help you out with what you're confusing, you're mixing up aspartame with olestra. Olestra is the food additive that doesn't break down in the small intestine, passes through, and if eaten in excess causes loose stools or related problems. The quantities of olestra used, since it's a substitute to fats, are significant. The quantities of aspartame used are far too small to have such an effect even if they didn't break down rapidly in the intestines (which has been amply documented that they do).

find it humorous that you are ranting about me for "anecdotal evidence" when you just challenged someone to "prove me wrong right now in just a couple weeks" by using the same kind of evidence.

Surely you'll admit that "I experienced it myself" is better than "some TV 'documentary' whose name I don't remember had some woman who claimed it"

The human digestive system does not throw away energy from digestible substances.

Uhhh, yeah, it can. Maybe there's more to this than you know? Ok, the digestive system may not, but the excretory system can.

Link

The interior surface of the small intestine is composed of microvilli that dramatically enlarge its absorptive surface, accounting for an extraordinary efficiency in absorbing consumed substrates: 98% of all digestible carbohydrate is absorbed; 95% of all fat is absorbed; and 92% of all protein is absorbed.

That's the baseline. How much more efficient exactly do you think your particular digestive system is than 98% of carbs, 95% of fat and 92% of protein?

Check out My Gate Array Project if you haven't already done so. The EE work is done by Chris Testa KD2BMH, I mostly do systems programming and business but do a lot of design checks, etc.