His physics cred is for real. Here’s a link to one of his papers...

They didn’t throw glowsticks in the tank?  Shame on you, researchers!

Can we please have a Marvel spin-off show of just Shuri explaining sciencey-things? Seriously, I’d watch the hell out of that one.

Okay, so serious question here, for gearheads that know better than I...

Gasoline is a mix of a lot of different stuff, and octane is one component of that. I understand that the numbers (87, 89, 110 low-lead, etc.) are not a percent, but what IS the actual percent (by mass) of octane in gasoline? And what would happen…

So I pretty much have exactly the same profile as this guy. Hell, we may camp together at the burn and not even know it. Anyways, being in the same boat, I went the cargo van route and got a Chevy Express 2500 for five grand. A well-maintained former utility company vehicle with 150k miles on it. With the money I…

Interesting thought, though it’s been too long since my crystallography days to really answer that one. I’m sure that (a) such a thing would be possible, with a carefully engineered material; and (b) it would NOT be easy to engineer. Maybe something like a piezoelectric layer that can apply an exact force to a…

Okay, physicist here so let me nitpick. It depends on what you mean by “reverse the direction of a force”. From the point of view of a billiard ball, the edge of the table effectively reverses the direction of the force. That said, I think I know what you mean. Because even in the case of the billiard table, the…

I predict that, in about 20 years or so, we’ll have early-2000's memes as trim names.

awesomesauce
nyan-cat
techno-viking
professor badass
etc.

You’re covered on the last one. Note that it is a (surprisingly) serious scientific paper.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.7985

And here’s the lay-reader’s version:

Now we’re insulting kindergartners? What has gizmodo become?! 

Possible mission names...

Damn cat has a lower Erdos number than I do. Maybe I could co-author a paper with him?

Take it personally? Meh, you make a good point, even if I were the editor or on the review board. The thing it that almost every “mid-tier” journal has roughly the same set of standards. Unless you’re at the level of Science or Nature, most peer-reviewed papers are going to have one or more holes in them. And…

So... disclaimer-ish: I am also a member of the AIAA Nuclear and Future Flight technical committee. But this is NOT one of the papers that I, myself, have reviewed. That said, I (and everyone on the committee) has been following the research very closely.

So here’s the thing about peer-review: it doesn’t mean that…