This is actually Don playing around in his free time for your entertainment and some mild investigation into neat water-tension behavior in micro-gravity. He's a total goofball.

"Belief" isn't a part of science. Currently all the data that we're collecting, experiments, and research supports the Big Bang as the most fitting explanation for the origin of the Universe.

Linguistic arugments could be made at this point to justify omission of the apostrophe in modal + not contraction statements since there is no competing construction that requires disambiguation and the vocal construction of /-nt/ is becoming more and more morphologically independent from the source verb "not".

Update from the NSF guys indicates that the hardware appears to be late 1990s/2000 so not KH-11 but something more modern, so probably a canceled project. There was some talk that it was maybe related to FIA but nobody can get anything official it seems.

The prevailing opinion among folks that would know is that these are probably first block KH-11 parts.

Shuttle used monomethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetraoxide for RCS, and the APUs use hydrazine as well (couldn't source the specific flavor though).

On a side note, China's Long March rockets actually are using UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) as their main fuel.

Truth. I wear a pair of Audio Technica ADH-700s at work. I am given endless amounts of grief. At least during the small periods of time that I actually remove them.

The laptop would have been packed, so shock isn't really a concern. I'm revisiting this thread though since I found a picture Don posted of him using the laptop. He's actually using it as a light-source for an ice-sheet experiement, but you can kind of see it here.

Yes, the rats are being intentionally paralyzed as part of the study.

No, really is just a basic off the shelf laptop for personal use. But don't let me stop you from dreaming big.

It's a personal laptop, most likely a standard 500-700$ range generic prefab. I forgot who it was for, I think Don, but it's just a personal laptop, not an ISS systems piece or anything special like that.

Some of us get to see this information due to various connections, and so yes, while it is cool that this went into space, the cool that Greg is mentioning refers to that manifest being made public.

Since there is limited weathering on Mars, the dust particulate is likely to be sharp/jagged edged, unlike the softer, worn and rounded dust/sand on Earth.

"Hipster" is the word that hipsters use to describe things that you think are stupid or passe. It's a post-hipster world where all the hipsters are now hipster haters.

Always gives me a chuckle.

Jayne: Six men came to kill me one time. And the best of 'em carried this. It's a Callahan full-bore auto-lock. Customized trigger, double cartridge thorough gauge. It is my very favorite gun.

Sidequests don't have an effect on your readiness, only multiplayer. All of the endings are essentially the same, with some very very small changes. Increasing your readiness to a high level will enable you to select a 3rd option.

Comparing the results of a single study that finds an association between vegetarianism and self-righteousness and a lack of altruism to the decades of research showing that DDT is poisonous, a carcinogen, along with a number of other detrimental health effects, I still think I'll take a little meat allergy over DDT…

Because I'd rather turn vegetarian than suffer from DDT poisoning.