Depends on the property value, I suppose. If the value is high enough that people are occupying 6 story apartments next door, it's probably close to being more effective than having 50ksqf of ground level parking, enabling other more fulfilling (profitable) uses.
I'm not suggesting parking decks. Think a modular pallet, perhaps with the charging equipment built in with a 480v bus connection at one end, with a cooling duct loop. Everything being modular makes it easy to maintain, and swap out bad parts for good without impairing operation. A glorified robotic forklift picks the whole thing up, car and all, and slots it into a heavy duty rack. Presto-chargo. It could be designed to fit in with other commercial buildings.

Would it be expensive? Probably, but Everything is relative, and some places real-estate is more valuable than the building that sits on it.

The linked paper isn't clear, but it rather implies that the material density does not monotonically increase from light-emitting surface to the accreting (proto-)SMBH, but has a minimum somewhere between "core" and "surface". If it did increase monotonically, it'd be a TáO - an interesting alternative engine for stars (but probably not the Sun), I think.

But if the commentary from ScienceDirect explains how this object maintains that low-density zone, and isn't a TáO, then I've missed it. and I can't summon the enthusiasm to track down the original paper on ArXiv.

(I would have given this submission a "+" vote, but that option has been removed and replaced with a link to a help page anchor named "#i_use_noscript" which is true and somehow makes me a bad person. Your, and Slashdot's, loss. )

(With or without a cat-staffing job too.)

What is the normal result of forcing a dog to eat it's own vomit?

who set prices at retail. Or at least, printed them onto the shelf label. Do they send people - invisible people - running around the stores to change the labels ahead of me looking at them? I used to have that idea about how the TV worked - with tiny changing rooms in the cabinet - but I understand now that they work differently and the miniature actors go through a Rick'n'Morty-esque "portal" to their changing rooms, allowing for thinner TVs.

Or, does "retail" mean something different in EN_US?

A week or two ago I noticed that the "vote" buttons for submissions had been changed to link to some part of the "help" system, under the anchor "iusenoscript". Which means I can't vote for, or against, submissions. Which I used to do.

But, to be honest, I'm wasting less and less time here. The problem of it being American-centric is getting worse (and it has always been bad) ; the lunatic right-wingers that come with that are getting madder ; the stories are getting more boringly uniform - obsessing over AI, and it's coming collapse. I can't even bring myself to make the effort to submit some good astronomy stories.

Shrug. If it dies, it dies.

Unfortunately (?) Slashdot replaces the voting buttons with a link to a "I_use_Noscript" page, rather than registering a vote. Which, yes, I do. And if that offends the powers that be at Slashdot, tough shit. I'm not disabling it on your site, or anyone else's. Get over it.

I've seen videos of these waymo lots and it is far and away the most idiotic system designed by people who are probably rather intelligent.

The problem is insisting that a charging depot for autonomous cars should look and behave as a traditional car park. It should be a fully enclosed garage, to keep out the rifraff, with a palletized racking system. When there is vacancy, the car would be signaled to drive onto the pallet, and the robot in the garage slots it into an available spot, silently. When the charge is complete, the car is put back out to the road and oriented such that it doesn't need to back out.

It could be built underground, above ground or adjacent to a traditional car garage. The neighborhood would be insulated from equipment noise, car noise, and it would occupy a fraction of the real estate.

It's more likely to get that engineering in America.

Asia in general and China in particular have had due respect for the lethality of respiratory viruses for a long time. I remember wondering about the Oriental habit of wearing respiratory masks in public places through the 2000s and 2010s - and it's largely down to their reasonable concerns about SARS (2004 to 2006) and then MERS (2012 to 2021).

No, I'd expect any lunatic gene engineering to take place in a Texas garage, performed by an anti-vaxx campaigner with delusional beliefs about how viruses spread. Because "Feee-dumb!"

(Yes, dear AC, you are being treated with contempt. It goes with being an AC.)

Sometimes the arguments last for decades.

And sometimes they're terminated by funerals.

The Sun, all stars, galaxies, formed by ordinary matter self gravitating into a volume where it's components interact with each other. With ordinary matter that implies a confining pressure produced by gravity, and a resisting pressure from the particles interacting with each other and not being able to share the same volume.

As a "RetiredChemist", you should recognise that situation from deriving the "Ideal Gas Laws" from Newtonian dynamics of particles and Van der Waal's expression for the volume of gas molecules (as opposed to the volume occupied by the gas under NTP, STP or whatever. REmember that lecture.

The thing about normal matter is that it's particles self-interact, leading to them having a consistent distribution of particle energies. And that means a gas of normal matter has a temperature, and it will radiate some of that energy away if it's temperature is greater than the ambient (currently 2.8-odd K ; the CMB temperature). Otherwise, it will collapse in volume under the influence of gravity - as you suggest - until it's internal temperature rises to the point that it starts to radiate it's thermal energy. Yadda, yadda, normal star formation theory, and on a bigger scale the same process for galaxies.

But with dark matter particles not (or very rarely) interacting (DM)particle on (DM)particle (and little from (DM)particle on (NormalM)particle), they just pass through your volume under consideration and out the other side, only responding to the gravitational force very slowly braking them as they ascend from the gravity well and into inter-galactic space. Then they slowly descend back into the middle of the galaxy, picking up speed from the gravitational field ... and pass through the middle of the galaxy without interacting with other DM (or NormalM) particles to shoot out the other side.

According to the -CDM model, DM does clump with matter - at the galaxy or galaxy-cluster scale. But it doesn't stick to other DM as well as "NormalM" does, so it hasn't (yet) condensed into dark galaxies etc.

Re-do your "Ideal gas law" calculations with a much smaller Van der Waals volume and much weaker electrostatic reaction between gas particles, and you too will reproduce the slowness of clustering. You could manage this when you were an undergraduate ; you can do it now.

You do realise that the first evidence for dark matter was found (and published) in the 1930s, well before anyone but Goddard's most optimistic liquid-fuelled rockets got off New Jersey potato fields.

No, you're an AC. You probably don't know that.

Your ignorance doesn't make it untrue.

I don't see how that follows from MightyMartian's post. Care to elaborate?

So that would explain the new human-lethal bird flu strain.

If this flu acquires human-human transmission (which other bird flu strains have developed at various times ; it's obviously not a difficult thing to acquire), how is RFK Jr going to deal with it? Vaginal douches and Ivermectin? horse tranquilizer to overdose?

The "lifeboats" aren't there for years on end. They come and go with cargo and/ or crew. (Tiangong isn't operated with permanent crew, so they have mothballing and de-mothballing procedures. Meh.) So the exposure profiles you suggest are not really correct.

so it must have been an extremely small object which is why they wouldn't have picked it up on radar and maneuvered out of the way which is normal practice.

I believe the relevant dimension for being "trackable" is around 1cm. Above that, trackable ; below that, much much harder to track. It's probably related to radar wavelengths.

I'm not sure exactly how that compares to a SuperMan-esque "speeding bullet", but phrases like "Glock 9mm" (I've just read the 'Killing Eve' books - Eve's service weapon) sort-of give an idea. I'm not sure it can be translated in to American domestic units though - somewhere between "sometimes lethal" and "always lethal".

FWIW the windows on this Chinese craft are triple layer, and the impact only cracked the outer one,

Various experiments over the decades with high-velocity impacts show that the most effective (per unit mass) protection scheme is to have multiple layers of material, separated by "stand-off" layers. This effectively spreads the initial impact over a wider area of the next layer, without propagating fractures between layers. Which would suggest an obvious design modification.

I never tried to take notes, but a fair number of commercial aircraft I've flown on have displayed a small (1~2mm diameter) hole in the lower corner of their exterior windows. I've always taken these to be ports for pressure-equalisation between the outer "protection" layer of PMMA, acrylic, or whatever, and the actual pressure vessel window. I'm not sure that all aircraft windows do this - unpressurised aircraft certainly don't - just the rip-tab for evacuation.