Came here to say much the same: these scientists are highlighting something that sci-fi has been talking about for at least a generation. Congratulations!

China has a history of not caring about space debris - from anti-satellite tests, to not properly de-orbiting giant rockets, to dropping hypergolic rockets on their own people. All space-faring nations are guilty in this regard, but while the US has made serious efforts to stop contributing to the problem, China takes umbrage at the mere suggestion that they should stop.

Like most pollution problems, there is little incentive to take the lead on mitigation if the next guy over doesn't follow along. Like all pollution problems, it's creating a cost - a negative externality - that no one wants to internalize and pay to fix.

I don't think that the Chinese government particularly cares if these astronauts die - they have a long track record of valuing life poorly. But they definitely care about image. And if these astronauts die in a very public way, perhaps that will put some motivation into China cleaning up their act. Even better if it serves as an impetus for binding global standards.

...and still producing the same articles twice per year.

I know the President and warrior-bro Hegseth like to pretend otherwise, but it's still actually called the Department of Defense. Actually changing the name would require passing a law. Wasting hundreds of millions to change the signs and letterhead doesn't count.

That is how you introduce John Carmack? He is so, so much more than "the former CTO of Oculus", which make him sound like just another a C-suite, VC-bro floozy. It would be better, especially in this context, to call him the co-founder of id Software - the author of Doom. For Quake III, he helped implement an ingenious hack for computing 1/sqrt(x) about 4x faster than a typical floating-point computation. He also developed an efficient algorithm for rendering shadows of 3D objects (Carmack's reverse, or Z-fail), which is still in use today.

It's fair to say Carmack's forgotten more about computing and performance than most people will ever know.

This article from IEEE Spectrum provides an overview of the "jet engine to data center generator" refurb process. It's still hard to imagine that it's economical, but there's at least one company out there doing it.

Oh no, not Chegg! That's awful!

Who the hell is Chegg again? Is that the tall guy with black hair, who used to sit near the kitchenette?

It appears the inhabitants of the Chimeric Age lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone. [ref]

Although very similar, I think the article is conflating two things for the sake of an attractive headline. A "jet engine" burns fuel in a turbine; the turbine's mechanical work is used to run the compression stages upstream of the combustion, with a fair bit of thermal or mechanical power left over. On a commercial airliner, that mechanical power is mostly used to spin enormous fans to produce thrust. A fighter aircraft mostly directs the remaining hot exhaust out the back for thrust - no fans involved.

Using a "jet engine" to generate electrical power for a datacenter would be idiotic and terribly inefficient, because a jet engine has been built and optimized to, ya know, fly an airplane. If you want one, you could buy a dozen today from a bone yard, but don't expect it to be useful for your datacenter. If instead you want electrical power, you would use a machine that, yes, still includes a turbine, but has been purpose-built built to turn the shaft of a generator. What's the difference? Lots of things, from the target shaft speed, to the maintenance intervals, to the cooling requirements, has been optimized in a turbine generator for producing electricity. Also: most of them have been designed to run on natural gas, rather than jet fuel.

The title says "First Shape Found That Can't Pass Through Itself". If we just went by the title, once could easily say "a sphere cannot pass through itself!" The summary clarifies by saying "convex polyhedron."

This is a cargo shuttle. When it's finished delivering stuff, it gets filled with trash, then deorbited to burn up in the atmosphere. Burning up isn't much of a test - physics will take care of most of it. About the only test is making sure the deorbit burn happens at the right time and duration, so that it burns up in the designated area.

The only craft with any significant "down-mass" capability is Dragon. Soyuz and (hahahaha) Dreamliner are pretty limited, because they mostly carry humans. Sierra's Dream Chaser will have down-mass capability, but hasn't made it to the launch pad yet.

Well played. Alas, no mod points.

Imagine having $100k just sitting in a checking account for year. Yeah that happens a lot, sure.

Strangely enough, some folks do. There are some that burn through $10^5-10^6 per month on their extravagant lifestyles, for whom having that much cash in a bank allows the accounts to run largely on autopilot. These are, of course, a minority, and we needn't worry our heads about them or their bankers.

On the other hand, there are retirees who subscribe to a bucket strategy, gradually shuffling assets from long-term holdings (i.e., stocks for growth, real estate) towards short-term assets (money markets, CDs, cash in a checking account). The timing of these moves, and how much cash they keep on hand, is constructed such that they don't have to sell assets during a downturn. Instead, they can ride it out using short-term assets (and pensions, social security, etc.), then backfill from long-term after things recover. As a result, the short-term bucket can have 1-5 years of living expenses, which can easily be $100k, even for someone living modestly.

Stated succinctly by another authoritarian: "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the Law."

Government spending is one of the key components that goes into the usual formula for GDP.

GDP = C + I + G + (X-M)

The "G" is government spending (federal, state, and local). In some countries, government spending is counted in the I (investment) term. But there needs to be some way to account for the dollars taken out of an economy as taxes (and borrowing) then re-spent as salaries, aircraft carriers, office spaces, schools, hospital services, etc.

It's not the only way to calculate GDP - there are alternate measures used in different places and at different times. And there are ways of calculating GDP that do not have a G component. But given that the G term is 1/4 to 1/2 of GDP for most countries, there's a lot that would be left out.