I don't think it's too rabidly nationalistic or ideological of me to say that I'd prefer such discoveries and technologies be developed in my own country, rather than importing them from China. From a scientific standpoint, I agree that the knowledge benefits everyone, no matter where the discoveries are made. But from the standpoint of economics and national security, every key technology that we have to import from a strategic rival is a potential liability.

Bummer, too, because his work on metal organic frameworks would have been perfect for extracting electrolytes. It's what plants crave.

I'll quote myself from a different comment:

The detector works by looking for neutron spallation off the fissile material. You can't tweak the design to get rid of the fissile material. So to avoid detection you either need to 1) prevent the Van Allen or cosmic ray protons from getting in and causing the spallation, or 2) prevent the neutrons from getting out. Both involve a fair bit of shielding, which may simply be impractical.

The detector works by looking for neutron spallation off the fissile material. You can't tweak the design to get rid of the fissile material. So to avoid detection you either need to 1) prevent the Van Allen or cosmic ray protons from getting in and causing the spallation, or 2) prevent the neutrons from getting out. Both involve a fair bit of shielding, which may simply be impractical.

Plutonium-based nuclear weapons usually contain uranium, too, as a tamper to aid in the original implosion, and/or as additional fissile material to boost yield. Here's a cross section of a US W87 warhead. Soviet designs weren't too different, because of espionage and physics.

I couldn't quickly find any sources that specifically discuss proton-induced neutron spallation in plutonium, but it is reasonable to expect that the effect would happen in fissile plutonium just like fissile uranium. Spallation from plutonium probably would have a different enough signature (i.e., a spectrum of neutron energies) that might even allow you to learn something about the bomb's internals.

I don't usually comment on AC posts. But this one beat me to the punch:

1) If the countermeasure is to jam the nuke's communications, then the obvious response is to rig the bomb to detonate automatically if it loses contact with command and control for too long.
2) But this approach only works as an effective deterrent if the other side - the one doing the jamming - knows that that will be the result.

In other words: it's very much like the ending of Dr. Strangelove.

The purpose of the itemized labels wasn't just to let consumers know how much their actual bill would be, rather than the advertised price. The itemized labels also made it harder for ISPs to hide their bullshit nonsense fees. What the heck even if a "broadband recovery fee" or a "convenience fee", and how does the ISP defend that being part of the bill? Now, it's just a "and here's all the extra stuff we're going to charge, justifiable or not, and we'll hide it in this one line item."

It's an informational asymmetry: the ISPs definitely know and have all the information - otherwise they couldn't generate a bill. But now the FCC is letting them obfuscate it. Properly functioning markets (which the GOP used to claim they cared about) rely on open and transparent pricing. This ain't it.

I am confused by this company's claims. It sounds very much like a magnatorquer - a device that can change a spacecraft's orientation - that just happens to use superconducting magnets instead of, say, copper wire. That's cool, and will certainly have useful applications.

But then they start talking about using it for propulsion, which I'm confused by. To get propulsion pretty much always requires reaction mass - something you're throwing behind the spacecraft. This doesn't do that, so how is it supposed to produce thrust?

That's neat, and I'm glad that it's out there. From the looks of it, it's a CAD program where you are using their scripting language to generate primitive solids and doing simple boolean operations on them (add, subtract, etc.). That could work for some things, but it sure seems tedious compared to CAD that offers a GUI. I also can't see that it allows for real parametric modeling, where this feature references this other feature (e.g., place a hole 4 mm from either edge of a corner; if the corner moves in space, the hole moves, too). It looks like you need to keep track of all that yourself in the scripting. I'm not sure how well it'll work with more complicated features, like defining rounds that follow edges, draft angles, and so on.

Here is iFixit's guide for replacing the Switch 2 battery (last updated 9 May 2026). It is not a simple procedure - harder even than most smartphones I've had to deal with. JIS 00 screwdriver, head and prying to remove stickers, more screws, snap features to pry open - all just to get the case open. Then more screws, unplugging and removing components, some solvent to (hopefully) loosen the battery glue, so that by Step 36 you've removed the old one. A few more steps to install the new one, re-apply thermal paste (?!), reinstall and reconnect the internals, snap the case back together, reinstall fasteners, reapply stickers (if they hold!). Only 63 steps - piece of cake!

Changing this to make for an easy user replacement will be a substantial redesign. And this is all to the good.

I've used a number of (mechanical) CAD packages, and dabbled with PCB layout tools. I still use some today. The best ones are NOT available for Linux, and there are no OSS equivalents that come close. Even Creo (nee ProEngineer), which I first used on SGI workstations 25 years ago, no longer has a *nix version. Yeah, yeah, you kinda-sorta can get it to work if you are willing to endlessly tinker with virtualization. But there are almost always things that don't quite work right - namely graphics support. And why bother with all the headaches when you could just dual-boot into Windows and have it run natively

The U.S. elected a carnival barker as President. Why should anyone be surprised?

396 satellites in orbit is commendable. It took decades for humans to put the first 396 satellites in orbit. Now we (mostly SpaceX) do thousands per year.

On the other hand, Amazon's FCC license required them to have 1616 satellites operating by July 30th, or risk losing their spectrum. Amazon has been granted an extension because...reasons. Some of the stated reasons may be genuine, like ensuring consumers (including the US gov't or military) have a competitor to Starlink, or having a US company secure a spot in a global land rush.

But there are probably unspoken reasons, too, having to do with Bezos' extraordinary wealth and Silicon Valley's cozy relationship to the White House. I expect that if some scrappy startup were in a similar situation, their spectrum would have been revoked, so that a bigger player could snatch it up. We all need to adjust to the fact that, since Trump v Slaughter, the FCC is no longer an independent commission - every member has their job at the pleasure of the President, who can fire them at will if he doesn't get the outcome he wants.