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I tend to find about a 25% first-week mortality rate, but after that they tend to last about as long as incandescent bulbs, no more no less.
We should also expect to see less of an effect in monotreme mammals (the platypus and echidna genera). They don't exhibit as much thermal stability as plancentals and marsupials, so they should need a wider range of enzymes. But 3 living genera makes a poor sample size, and the fossil record for monotremes is very poor.
~The Jargon File, Appendix B.
Mercury's eccentricity can be pumped to values large enough to allow collision with Venus within 5 Gyr
Except that in 5 Gy Sol will be a red giant and have already engulfed Mercury and Venus, and probably Earth as well.
Won't happen. They continue their merry little orbit the same as any other mass.
Pop quiz:
If the sun were replaced with a black hole of equal mass
A.) Earth would get thrown from the solar system
B.) The orbit of all the planets would remain unchanged
C.) Jupiter would become the new sun.
D.) All the planets woulld be sucked into the black hole
The answer is B.
MOND has been debunked. Recent observations from a galactic collision show the dark matter halo trailing the normal matter. We know the dark matter halo is trailing based on the gravitational lensing of a distant galaxy. While I had nothing against MOND, the confirmation of dark matter halos pretty much kills it.
Guess rodents don't like the smell of wet dog either.
I don't think its the "wet" part that keeps the rodents away.
I might try this. I've got plenty of husky crosses and a squirrel problem.
When I lived in Maryland, we had those voting machines also. They also have a paper tape (or individual ballot stack) that goes with them. Pulling the final lever (that registers your vote) punches the paper as a second copy of the vote. The blades on the punch *should* be resharpened every election to prevent hanging/dimpled chads in the paper and whatnot, but they almost never are. This can lead to serious problems, like discrepancies between the machine tally and the paper tally.
Now I'm living in Minnesota, and we use paper ballots, as in fill in the circle by the candidate. Idiots still manage to screw that up. I saw some challenged ballots from the Senate election, and it looked like some people let their 3-year-old vote for them.
As shown by follow-up observations performed with ground-based telescopes, it was a very distant event, and soon it looked like this was the farthest GRB ever observed. A team of international astronomers led by Swift Italian Team and CIBO, using the AMICI prism with the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, was able to compute its redshift at about 8.1, corresponding to a distance of more than 80 Gpc, when the universe was only slightly more than 600 million years old (Figure 2).
Initially, the star would have been very metal*-poor (only a little lithium left over from the big bang.)
Given that star went supernova only 630My post-big bang, it is reasonable to assume it had a minimum mass of 3-4 Msun, and a maximum of probably 10-15 Msun. Those numbers suggest that it did fuse right to nickel.
The interesting thing (what the parent was probably refering to) is not really the final metallicity (which is merely a function of the star's mass) but the initial metalliticy, which cannot.
*To an astronomer, anything heavier than helium is a metal
It seems that more and more mathematicians are using a new, high level language named "research student".