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.)

Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

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.

Desirable to see outside, I'd agree - for your various reasons. "Need" on the other hand is a much steeper challenge.

But considering the relatively low stresses encountered when on orbit, and the presence of five robotic arms already on the station, the option of fitting a protective cover while the "lifeboat" is docked would be one to consider. 3 magnets and a metal (aluminium, or titanium ; or even a tough polymer composite) plate would do it, if there are conveniently located ferrous metal nodes on the exterior of the spacecraft.

Dock "lifeboat" (since it has other uses than "life saving in crisis", I am uncomfortable with calling it a "lifeboat", but "meh") ; transfer crew and/ or cargo ; install porthole shield(s) ; do other stuff ; remove shields as part of the "prepare for launch" checklist.

As a seafarer all my working life, I'd be comfortable with procedures like that. It's not as if real world lifecraft don't also have launch procedures. Which everyone is trained to carry out, by the book, following the diagrams printed on the lifecraft themselves. It's a manageable problem.

The fracture toughness quoted for that material is about 3 times higher than that for soda glass. Which is "better". But not compellingly better. Replacing the porthole with a metal panel matching the rest of the skin, and maybe a CCTV external port for communication between ground crew and contents of the spacecraft would probably be better value for money.

Which is a parameter everyone pays attention to. It might not be an overwhelming factor, but it is considered.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Alternative enforcement mechanism (which would rule out Musk as an investor) would be to hardwire the editing so that any breeding results with "wild type" humans would be both female and profoundly haemophiliac. (Or that all male offspring have some lethal failure of oxygen metabolism. Whether that would be acceptable to Musk ... who cares?)

If the universe is said to be expanding, that means that the universe has a boundary.

Go and revise your non-Euclidian geometry. You clearly failed that exam.

It is possible for the universe to be finite in 3-dimensional extent, and unbounded.

But the demand for petrochemicals as chemical feedstocks will continue.

We might not burn the stuff, but we'll continue to want to put it into chemical plants because it's cheaper than making long hydrocarbon chains ourselves.

Until someone manages to commercialise algae-catalysed CO2 -> long chains reactions. Which without the fuel market, is not so attractive an investment.