Comment Plug irony (Score 3, Informative) 155
Like trying to plug an essentially outdated USB A socket into an iPhone's charge port
Assuming they mean Lightning, USB-A will outlive it...
Comment And a 9kV supply (Score 5, Interesting) 30
More impressive to my mind, and omitted from the summary, is the step-up circuit from the solar cells' 4.5V to the 9kV required for the electrostatic motor, all within that tiny mass.
Comment Last time for my favourite fact (Score 5, Interesting) 73
Exactly one human being is known to have been alive for both the Wright Flyer's first flight and Ingenuity's.
Kane Takana was 11 months old when Orville first took off; and 118 years old when Ingenuity first took off. She passed away on the first anniversary of its maiden flight.
Comment Species makes huge effect on the environment! (Score 5, Insightful) 95
So up to 12,000 beavers have made a small change to a stream, and that's exacerbating climate change?
The 8 billion large primates (mostly) further south have nothing to do with it?
Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 193
With a few more impurities added, you get a human.
Comment If you want to avoid accusations of playing God... (Score 1) 35
Comment Conclusions a little misleading... (Score 1) 75
Whilst I'm not for moment denying man-made global warming, the article implies that the zero-degree line has been steadily getting higher.
The table in the article, however, shows the second-highest year as 1995. There's clearly a lot of variability in this level.
Comment Thin client (Score 4, Insightful) 260
Ecclesiastes 1:9: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Words written by a wise man, or perhaps a Wyse man in this case.
Comment Observational accuracy? (Score 2, Insightful) 82
I'm astonished, and very sceptical, of their ability to distinguish orbital decay of 1ms per year versus predictions of 0.02ms per year, at a distance of over 3,000 light years.
Comment Re:CGIS? (Score 4, Informative) 52
That's just where they laid out all the equipment after removing it from the crawl space.
Comment Re: 100 million developers (Score 2) 32
Comment Re:Scope time: local planets pics or alien life ? (Score 2) 81
How long do you think the Neptune pics took to get? I'd imagine they're also really useful for calibration and understanding of the telescope's capabilities.
If we found (non-communicating) alien life on a planet 50ly away, it'd be in the news for a couple of weeks then everything would be back to normal.
Comment Re:Makes no sense: humanity too young. (Score 1) 57
Ah, got it (also reading the article helps). We're looking at a cross-section of the pressure waves rather than waiting for them to pass us by.
Comment Makes no sense: humanity too young. (Score 3, Interesting) 57
OK, so if they raised the sound 57 octaves, a multiplier of 144 quadrillion, and they got a sound out of that which humans can hear, so at least 20Hz, that means the period of the original sound would have been at least (1/20 Ã-- 144 quadrillion) = 7 quadrillion seconds, which is about 230 million years for just a single wavelength.
I doubt we've been measuring it for that long.