What's Cool in Science This Week?

[Labbug]

https://www.foxnews.com/science/astronomers-watched-a-black-hole-destroy-a-star-in-real-time

[Sir Slash]

Is that what that was? I thought it was the Cowboys season going down the drain.  :hug:

[Windigo]

Is that what that was? I thought it was the Cowboys season going down the drain.  :hug:

Election integrity in the USA?

[Gusington]

That looked more like YO MAMA's hairpiece.

[Sir Slash]

Windy had a Momma?  :o  I thought you all told me he was a product of Spontaneous Combustion? Now I don't know what to believe.  ???

[Labbug]

https://www.foxnews.com/science/tectonic-plate-lost-for-60m-years-found-hiding-under-pacific-ocean

[steve58]

NASA to reveal Moon 'new discovery' Monday.

p.s.  never knew NASA had a flying 100-inch telescope (SOFIA)!  :o  How the heck do they manage to keep an airborne 747 stable enough for a telescope?

[Sir Slash]

Have they FINALLY found Jimmy Hoffa you think?  :o

[Pete Dero]

How the heck do they manage to keep an airborne 747 stable enough for a telescope?

You don't stabilize the 747 but you stabilize the telescope :

https://www.sofia.usra.edu/multimedia/about-sofia/faqs#T3

You isolate the telescope from the airplane by mounting it on a spherical pressurized oil bearing. The plane shakes and quakes, but the telescope doesn't feel it. Second, you direct the wind away from the telescope by shaping the side of the airplane so as to deflect it, and install a little deflector fence on the edge of the telescope cavity as well. Third, you stabilize the telescope against sudden motion (wind does get through) by spinning three orthogonal gyroscopes which are rigidly attached to the structure, and fourth, you steer the telescope so as to keep it steady, by tracking a distant star and giving the telescope magnetical nudges to point it toward a fixed direction.

https://www.sofia.usra.edu/multimedia/about-sofia/faqs#top

[steve58]

^makes sense.  Thx Pete.

[steve58]

This one really is cool:  https://www.cnet.com/news/super-cool-white-paint-basically-creates-free-air-conditioning/

...and this one is for the environment:  https://insidescience.org/news/new-technique-turns-waste-plastic-valuable-chemicals

[Gusington]

That last one can save the oceans!

[Pete Dero]

That last one can save the oceans!

Or we could stop using plastic.

[Labbug]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/glenn/2020/the-propulsion-we-re-supplying-it-s-electrifying

[Gusington]

Whatever you say Pete. But since that hasn't happened yet and probably won't in our great grandkids' lifetime, I like the above posted solution.