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Comment Re:Aren't ... (Score 1) 75

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

Comment Re:I'm a bit suprised by this article (Score 2) 18

They must have run into very strange and unexpected artefacts to have to rely on machine learning to correct this...

Or someone developed a new deconvolution algorithm some time between feature freeze on the instrument package (2012, thereabouts?) and today, and it turned out to be particularly more useful with the AMI focussing-aid.

But it's on-the-ground post-processing, so it can be retrospectively applied by any researcher on their "proprietary" period data, and by anyone else to non-proprietary data in the STSI archive.

Comment Re:How is this anything new? (Score 1) 18

Do you have any idea how competitive the process of getting observation time on JWST is? Something approaching 10% of time requests get granted. The other 90% don't get granted.

Your sketched procedure fails at

1. Take lots of photos of the same shot

And again at

2. Repeat step 1 for a lot of overlapping images

Curiosity (and Perseverance) are in a different situation - while the arm/ drill/ XRF tools are nose-up on a rock doing one set of analyses, the cameras can be more-or-less independently pursuing the sort of photographic oversampling you're talking about. The data from, say, an hour of XRF scanning is going to use a lot less bandwidth to Earth than an hour of imaging data.

Comment Re: Increased surface exposure. (Score 1) 13

Building design tends to go for a 2:1 safety margin between expected loads and design strengths. Bridges tend to be a lot more conservative 6:1 or 8:1 between design strength : expected load.

There are good arguments you can have whether a design (and construction process) should have an 8:1 safety margin, or a 6: 1 margin, into which you can easily get a 60% materials cost. If you can justify the lower safety factor and lower cost.

As the Forth road bridge example I just mentioned upthread illustrates, changes in vehicle design can seriously impact the expectations for a structure. The introduction through the 1980s of increased lorry weights from 28 tonnes when the bridge was designed and built to a maximum of 44 tonnes when a replacement bridge was commissioned lead to increased rates of wire breakages in the suspension cables and ... well you (and the bridge managers) can see where that's going to end up.

Comment Re: Increased surface exposure. (Score 1) 13

So, order of a hundred years?

Note : you asked about "bones", not fossils. The process of turning a bone (any tissue, really, but most often a bone or a tooth, for a vertebrate) into a fossil is a subject of it's own, stretching in effects from forensic science, through archæology and into regular palæontology Look up "taphonomy".

A 100 year lifetime isn't at all unreasonable for a structure. No structure is eternal (though the Pyramids are making a decent attempt - they'll probably not make it beyond their half-million).

I was driving over the new Forth road bridge recently, eyeballing the 140-odd year old riveted cast iron of the Rail Bridge, and the old road suspension bridge (which made it past it's 50 year design life but didn't make it's century because of increases in vehicle loads and counts leading to accelerating wear rates). I wonder how they're going to bring the old road bridge down? Dismantling, or dynamite? There are enough ships using that channel that dynamite has a *lot* of difficulties.

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 1) 112

How many people drive a pickup with a huge cargo bed that only gets used a couple times a year?

In this country? I can't remember seeing one that didn't have a company's logos down the side. Oh - tell a lie ; one of my neighbours uses one. It's a day-to-day load shifter for his building work business, but he doesn't waste money on vinyls for it. He has a normal car too, and they alternate on the street outside his apartment.

Comment If I had one of those Jobs coins... (Score 4, Insightful) 79

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

Comment Re:If you thought SEO/affiliate marketing spam is (Score 1) 18

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Insightful) 166

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Informative) 166

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

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