Which papers discussing the various theories of dark matter posit that stars orbit somewhere "as if gravity wasn't a constraint".

Just the Arxiv links would be more than sufficient.

That there should be a phase in the early Universe where immense stars of nearly pure hydrogen would form was predicted theoretically 20 years ago,

I remember reading the paper when it came out.

another fun article in the "things I won't work with" blog

Derek Lowe, currently hosted at Science Mag, for example https://www.science.org/conten...

For people of a certain sense of humour, it is utterly, eye-wateringly funny. Otherwise, your kilometrage may vary.

Without RTFA, would I be right in thinking it's the Munich Group of happy laughing pyromaniacs with the leather aprons, armour plate, and light roof?

Anything which burns very energetically in air will turn some of the air into (various) oxides of nitrogen.

Most of which are likely to be GHGs to some degree. They have IR-absorption features so they're likely to reduce the IR transmission from Earth's surface to the rest of the universe.

There are also slow and fast explosives, which basically just rate how fast they convert the explosive material into gas.

The measurement is presented in units of a velocity, because it is, at a very basic level, a velocity.

If you made a 1cm by 1cm by 10km long lu-shaped loop sample of TNT, and placed it near a similar length loop of (say) "AN/FO" (ammonium-nitrate/ fuel-oil) and detonated both at one end from the same detonator, the shock waves of the explosives' detonations would arrive separated by around 5 seconds. TNT has a moderately high detonation velocity - around 6900 m/s, while AN/FO maxes out a bit below 5000 m/s. Pure AN has a detonation velocity of about 2500 m/s, while gunpowder, a "low explosive" can be from 0.06 to 9 m/s (depending on the granularity).

Detonation velocity is a useful thing to know if you're trying to design, say, a demolition scheme to bring the centre of a building down onto it's footprint, then collapse the walls in onto the same rubble pile. Which is why "blasting cord" is designed to have a very specific (per brand) detonation velocity.

dynamite, of Dynamit Nobel fame, is regular nitroglycerin that has been desensitised by mixing it with diatomaceous earth

Various materials have been used, including Kieselgh, the "diatomaceous earth" you mention. It's probably a synthetic zeolite mineral these decades, because the natural product is more expensive. But Dynamite per se is much less popular for general explosive use in favour of various other explosives, such as AmFO and synthetic mixtures such as "PowerGel".

when the nitroglycerine starts seeping out of the clay

On this side of the Pond, we call that "sweating", as in the phrase "porridge oats are good for sweating". See "other materials" above - it's a field expedient worth knowing about for when calling the Bomb Squad isn't such a good option.

nitroglycerine and TNT are unrelated.

Except by both containing 3 -NO2 "nitro" groups per molecule, introduced by quite similar chemical processes. Hence the name.

Why isn't at least the headline ROT13-ed. That's about the lowest level of "obfuscation" I can think of.

I wish "Science Journalist" was a thing

It is a thing. There are ... about 4 or 5 on each of "Nature" and Science ; maybe 10 times that many in the rest of the science press (American Scientist, Scientific American, New Scientist, Sky and Telescope. Geoscientist's journalist (and editor retired about 5 years ago and wasn't replaced. Guess the global population is a few dozen. Median age probably in their 50s or 60s. Recruitment - close to nil. Profitability, nil.

Ah - there's the problem. Profitability. If "profit" is the driving force in your publication model, yes journalism is extinct.

Phil Plait - yeah, him and Ethan Segal (used to post here as "StartswithABang") are the "recruits" in the astronomy field ; a couple of other contenders trying to mix it with being actual research scientists (one just dropped off the scene - cancer).

The patient isn't dead, but the prognosis is not optimistic.

See my comment a little up-thread. Keyword : "petrological" - I doubt that has appeared in any other posts in this thread.

Annealing itself is pretty well understood. It's effect on radiation damage in electronics, less so. They'll also be working at the "low-T, long-t" end of materials science, whereas metalworkers (and metamorphic petrologists) tend to work more at the higher-T end of the range. Though we geologists tend to go to "long-t" too - million year exsolution of iron phases in a cooling asteroid core? I'll just get a sample. So, yeah, it's a less-explored space. But obviously useful. It'll be an experimental hole that gets sketched in pretty damned quick.

Of course, it's not without risk. The process works by moving atoms around to allow defects - both radiation damage and atoms that don't quite fit the crystalline structure. But that precise patterning of, particularly "atomic defects (a.k.a. dopants) are exactly what turns semiconductor crystals into electronic components. It literally was a "this will cure it or destroy it" effort. As you could tell by them working the system close to unusability before trying to fix it.

[Trump-cultist voice] Serves them pinko-commie-subresives right for scaring Amerikuh with warnings about climate change from space-based globally uniform data sets. Every MAGA know that if you don't measure it, it doesn't exist.

I'm slightly surprised he didn't shut down the whole agency. That's probably next year's plan.

Nope. Annealing a material has been a way of getting defects to realign and "relax" since ... probably about 4000 BP. Even before the bronze age combined arsenic ores and copper ores (later replacing arsenic with tin smelted off-site) to make bronze, copper was being used as a structural metal and the Egyptians learned there was a sweet spot between being "fresh from the forge" (relatively soft), through lightly "work hardened" before it became excessively work hardened, and fractured. When it would need re-melting and re-casting. If you got it in the sweet spot, you'd get optimal hardness, most usage, and putting it at the edge of the forge to a barely-red heat would restore it to "fresh from the forge". But if you took it too far and fractured the entire tool, you'd have to heat it to an orange-yellow heat and re-cast the whole tool.

Annealing is a subtle materials science trick which people have been working on for over 4000 years. Just under 200 years ago the metallurgical microscope (which is a mode my petrological microscope can operate in. Because, ore minerals.) allowed us to understand what was actually happening at the literally microscopic level.

Annealing's 150 K hotter brother process "zone refining" is how all these "semiconductor chip" things actually get prepared for printing the "integrated circuits" onto.

The polar-ish orbit isn't wholly responsible for the radiation problems. Jupiter's radiation environment is brutal at all (magnetic) latitudes. It's worse over the poles, but it fries electronics (and would fry people, absent a *lot* of heavy shielding).

Humans will probably walk on Titan before the walk on Ganymede. And Io-walking, being so deep into the radiation belts, is never going to compete with thermonuclear tiddlywinks as a popular pastime.

Hmmm. Which satellite is likely to give the highest yield of helium? Something with a sub-surface ocean, but which has never been hot enough to melt all the way to surface (generally).

Again, without my notebook (on the wrong logical computer) I'm back-of-the-thumbnailing, but Europa, Callisto and Ganymede all have SSOs, and Europa is the smallest, so easiest to launch from. But ... it matters if it's ice crust is thicker or thinner than Callisto's. It matters a lot.

Not just the soft goods. Almost everything that doesn't have to be metal will be plastics, because the energy costs of smelting ores to metals, then processing and forging/ casting them, are so much higher than for doing organic chemistry at non-glowing temperatures.

Outside launch from a planet or large satellite, you don't need high power or high acceleration in space. Star Wars Trek notwithstanding.

I tried but yo momma wasn't hot enough.