The coronavirus pandemic drove oil demand so low that the price of a barrel of oil briefly hit negative dollars,

Eh, if that happens, we can hope for a moon. As long as we don’t name it Europa 2: Alpha Centauri Boogaloo, it’ll be okay to attempt a landing there.

“one of the most nutrient-rich and ductile resources on the planet.”

Transmuted into fission products.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product

Like expulsion, which has happened only five times in U.S. history it’s very rare and considered an extraordinarily humiliating punishment.

Once a tick tries to bite a vaccinated person, the hope is that its saliva will set off an almost immediate immune reaction.

Hmm. I was about to object that that would lead to too many rotations per minute, but https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Space-Settlement-Population-Rotation-Tolerance-Globus.pdf suggests human tolerance for that has been underestimated. Besides, if a goal is research into the long-term effects of low gravity, we…

I think that’s incredibly overoptimistic, although that’s mostly because you also mentioned rotating space station. First rule of mechanical engineering is “Moving things break.” Even for something light like simulated lunar gravity, a rotating space station is an unprecedented engineering problem. And operationally,…

I’m not familiar with that. Reading the Wikipedia page, though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop , it looks like Bosch introduced the same feature via technology-they-said-was-different around 2015—stopped by a judgement that said Bosch’s tools DID infringe some of the patents.

Yeah, but when a science fiction author says it, it’s a vision of a possible future that might be worth aspiring to. When a wealthy man says it, it’s a for-sure definite actionable plan for dystopia. It’s that money being the root of all evil thing.

Bezos could easily finance a small private space station designed to rotate on its long axis for simulated gravity and serve as a test bed for off-world habitation.

You’ll be missed.  Still, onwards and upwards!

From https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003830 (which is linked in the text, just behind the word “published” rather than something more useful like the title of the thing, “Consumption of coffee and tea and risk of developing stroke, dementia, and poststroke dementia: A cohort…

Feeling a bit silly for yelling at the clerk that it was clearly an apricot rather than a plum.

2011.  If it hasn’t happened after ten years, I think it’s going to take a change in circumstance for it to happen ever.

Hey, we Californians are Columbusing them as fast as we can.  Dratted pandemic.

That or a manual solution—but it takes a crew of eight and a crane to swing a cowswatter.

By the time we’re talking about moving a significant percentage of the population and industry out of the gravity well? Yes.

Italian-American cuisine developed when Italian immigrants had to adapt to using the ingredients readily available in the cities around the turn of the century. Specifically for meatballs, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1986/07/pasta/306226/ , where “Levenstein and Conlin” are a pair of history…