hmm... good point. I agree, hesitantly. Still think a lot more ground work would need to be done by rovers to find the appropriate site for setting up a temporary base. Also, A LOT more research needs to be put into terraforming the planet.

I've never had a billionaire friend who's my age and wears a hoodie. What's the etiquette here? Is he expected to pick up the bill every time?

One does not need a physical standard. Just look at the definition of the meter in terms of the speed of light. For this, one just needs an experimental setup that is able to measure the speed of light to the desired accuracy.

love it!

There are two proposed solutions. One via the Avogadro constant: "The kilogram is the mass of exactly 5.018 451 272 5×10^25 unbound carbon-12 atoms at rest and in their ground state." The other via Planck's constant: "The kilogram is the mass of a body at rest whose equivalent energy corresponds to a frequency of…

Let me make a few corrections. First, Einstein did not discover nor "invent" the photoelectric effect. He was the first to describe it as being caused by "quanta" of light. And it was THIS work, as the father of quantum mechanics, that gave Einstein his one and only Nobel prize. At the time, Thompson's treatment of…

Carbonated sheep milk..... just typing that made me vomit in my mouth a little.

It would be cool if the video synchronized the countdown, "T-10, 9, 8...". But that would have been a lot of work!

It's all crap because in New Zealand NO ONE says "soda". We use "soft drinks" as an equivalent to soda. The latter is not a subcategory of the former.

Statement retracted. It visited 2 asteroids and collected dust, returned back to earth to drop off sample. Then headed out again to visit another asteroid: "Stardust flew past the asteroid named Annefrank and traveled halfway to Jupiter to collect the particle samples from the comet Wild 2. The spacecraft returned to…

Yea, that's the message of the actual rover one posted above. I was referring to (and linked to) the one from a few weeks back about the moon landing and NASA: "If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now.". I think they have been still doing amazing things from discovering…

Interesting. Maybe it's good to warm up without the fan and then switch it on after a few minutes. I remember the exercise bikes at my old gym doing that automatically. Also at this gym, they had a recirculating AC circuit. The problem was it transfered food smells from the staff's kitchen to where I was working out.…

This is marvelous work observing the filament of dark matter—or more specifically the bending of light, assumed to be caused by dark matter. It by no means "proves" anything. It's only one observation. Proving the existence of something in science is very demanding, hence the 1 in 3 million criteria of the bump at…

Lots of posts about this being a stupid idea—and it is. But look on the webpage on the International Design Excellence Awards. They are just DESIGN awards. And let's be honest, very few designers, especially those that form award committees, know anything about practically. (Waits for the rage...) I kid you not, one…

This post is a great reminder of how wrong this XKCD http://xkcd.com/1074/ comic is. 15 years of continued presence on Mars is a pretty damn good accomplishment.

Huh? Why spend 100 times more sending a walking bag of bacteria that needs to eat, shit and sleep. This little rover has been running for 3000 days without complaining or asked to return home. A rover is also much less likely to contaminate the surface (since we are looking for life here!). I do wish that if we do…

I've always wondered if your workout is less effective because you're sweating less from using the fan. Has any research gone into this? I know that in the winter you burn a lot more calories just maintaining your core body temperature; hence the calorie rich foods (cheeses) eaten by mountainous peoples. But I'm…

There is a slight debate over our opinions, but not the physics. Your opinion is that rest mass of elementary particles are not so important because the mass we experience everyday is relativistic. I think otherwise. I argued before that without rest mass of electrons, there would be no atoms. Something else I thought…

Let me proceed this debate in good humour. :-) Yes, the rest mass of hadrons are indeed predominately relativistic energy. However, for the electron (and all other leptons) this is not the case. One could make an argument that if the electron were (rest) massless, it would shoot off at the speed of light and not be…

Yes. People in Hong Kong go crazy for air conditioning. Still though, the CO2 and CO2 equivalent emission per capita is still 3 times less than in the US. :-)