It's all reflective. They want the astronauts to be visible to drivers at night.

One morning at the breakfast table a spider was spinning a web off the overhead lamp. It was so . . . mesmerizing . . . to watch it make its circles, to see the way it felt out the spacing between lines and kept everything tight . . . it ended up being one of the very few spiders I released outside instead of…

Yes! Finally, some Straub-erry love from Lauren. I was always sad that the great sci-fi strip Starslip never made "Saturday Webcomic" before it ended.

Ha!

Wikipedia puts the lactase-persistence boom (when it went from a fringe mutation to a highly selected-for trait) at around 10,000 years ago. If that's true, it's still cheesemaking that's relatively recent, not the "evolution of lactase-persistence."

I'm in a better mood last night, and I'm sorry for my overly strong reply then.

I understood the "double" part. But double is meaningless without context. That "non-negligible chance of dying suddenly" is exactly the number that needed to be in the article for the "double" claim to have any meaning at all. But it wasn't.

Any article that mentions "doubling your risk" should also mention what the risk was in the first place to put that claim in context.

Disappointing that this contains trees (which are interesting, but are a different ball game than dinosaurs.)

"Not listening to the one guy who claims 'magical corpse particles' turn living people into corpses" is not exactly equal to "ignoring science". Even though his results (of one non-repeated experiment) were encouraging, his proposed mechanism was ridiculous, and everyone rightly saw that.

Not the most comfortable nanobots to have running through your bloodstream . . . but it'll do.

It's a made-up nonsense word.

Y2K was an actual thing, even though it had little-to-nothing to do with Unix.

I love getting unlimited free soda at bars.

Wikipedia has a page called "Abundance of the chemical elements." There's a table on the right (you have to click "show") that has a "ppb atoms" column, indicating how many out of a billion atoms would be represented by each element. And on Earth, there are 1.6 million carbon atoms, and 12 silver atoms, for every…

I've heard a great white shark can take a Betta in a fight, too. I mean, seriously.

Oh, you're right. I saw the "million" next to Sagittarius-A and got mixed up. Your number is right.

You take the mass of the black hole (17,000,000 x the mass of the sun) and divide by the volume of the event horizon (4/3)π(2 light days^3), which is .00005 kg/m^3. 1 atmosphere of pressure is 1.29 kg/m^3 . . . so that black hole is 1/26000 the density of the air we breathe. Crazy un-dense.

Data served on the U.S.S. Trieste out of the academy, aboard which he was promoted to Lieutenant and then Lt. Commander . . . and the Trieste shows up in several TNG episodes alongside the flagship of the fleet, so it's not like it was just a backwater patrol ship or something. Even if Picard hand-picked Data as his…

Your intuition about silver is correct . . . there are 12 atoms of silver for every 1,600,000 atoms of carbon on Earth.