The perchlorates are a serious sticking issue. While I continue to be amazed at human ingenuity, the remediation problem for Martian soil seems to be very difficult. Not only that, but the perchlorates are *everywhere*, which means the entire environment is fundamentally poisonous to humans. That doesn't make it impossible, but it raises the bar another notch where we are already potentially dealing with low atmospheric pressure, extremely high CO2 concentration, very low O2 concentration, serious cold, etc. Again, not impossible, but Mars is almost as inhospitable as the Moon.

Yeah, their assumption that a sterile planetary body will not spontaneously develop this chemistry is not a really solid null hypothesis, especially given the number of demonstrations that amino acids fall out of proto-Earth conditions.

The destruction was with the previous Doctor, under Chris Chibnall.

$diety, I wish I had mod points right now -- that's brilliant!

Maybe it's because I'm a scientist, but I had to use a bot to distill down the example for me:

I had to press it to simplify a few times, and it came down to:

And also, maybe because I speak science-geek, the quote from the abstract ...

... makes perfect sense.

The ribbon format is just bad. There is no uniformity to the UI. You have to spend time learning the UI, rather than just using it.

This is definitely a situation where simpler is better, and it's very hard to beat the standard drop-down tree'd menu with modal dialogs at the leaves.

Japan really doesn't span enough longitude to warrant multiple time zones, unlike China which spans something like 5.

Yes, and with DST in the dead of winter, dawn in Boston won't happen until 8 AM. Full on daylight won't be until about 9 AM.

All it will take is one cycle of DST during winter, and everyone will clamor for either going back to the semi-annual shifting, or Standard Time. That's what happened last time this misguided experiment was actually tried.

Oh, dear readers, you didn't realize? Yes, the very same argument --- exactly the same discussion --- happened in the early 1970s, and, for exactly one year, 1974, we went to Standard Time nationwide in the US. Lasted one winter.

So, to everyone who is reading this and was born after that time, for the love of everything holy, look back to learn from the mistakes your predecessors made. You are not nearly as special as you think. This is not the first time.

You forgot to mention random ficticous meeting cancellations.

This has been happening on the Outlook via Web interface for a long time. Total PIA, it is.

Actually, cursor and mouse handling by that web app is a god-awful mess.

Heavy lamp wire is great. You should probably twist it, though, to reduce the chance of EMI pickup. Personally, I used shielded twisted pair, because I can get it easily.

But, as a recent project in my lab demonstrated, even a short length of what seems to be heavy enough wire can have non-trivial effects when you're talking about amps of current and single-digit ohm impedances. Consider this: if a speaker has a nominal impedance of 8 ohms, and the wire going from the amp to the speaker (including all the intervening connections) has a potential resistance of even a few hundred milliohms, that parasitic becomes a non-trivial fraction of the load.

I don't know at what fraction the parasitics would become inaudible, but I do know that biamped and triamped systems which directly connect the load to the amp outputs, with crossover filters before the amp, sound gobs better than single-amp systems with cables and crossovers between amp and speaker drivers. The parasitics would be a primary suspect to explain that difference.

There is the question of jurisdiction. A judge in one country does not have say over what happens in another.

Imagine you lived in China. Would you give two shakes of a rat's posterior what a judge in the US said you could or could not do? If you lived in England, wouldn't you just laugh off what a judge in Brazil says you could or could not do? If you lived on Christmas Island, would you care what a judge in Ivory Coast said?

I trust you get the point.

Why not just send a text to the client who just had the Waymo ride, 10 seconds after the door opens and stays open, saying, "don't forget to close the door!"

And they're going to operate their phones with spacesuit gloves on? They're going to do EVAs clutching their precious phone? NASA is allowing regular consumer-grade items into space when each launch is going to cost billions of dollars?

Seriously?

I'm sorry, this is one of the most daft ideas I've heard in a long time.

Thanks for the civility.

Interestingly, she was not heartbroken. Disappointed, yes. Astronauts (at least the ones I've met) and those who get close are incredibly resilient people. She ended up working in a company that builds experiments that fly on the ISS, on contract for the scientists who want to run them. Part of her job was astronaut liaison.

NASA's medical examination is far, far more involved than anything a civilian will ever experience. They examine every part of your body, as intensively as technology will allow. They found her anomalous condition in a part of the head that is not normally of concern or even examined. The wild thing is that they recognized her condition, despite it being very rare. The people at NASA often take a lot of grief on Slashdot, but to a person, I've never met a more impressive set of people, and I'm fortunate enough to work at a top-tier university.