Recent comments in /f/askscience

Naive_Age_566 t1_j743eh8 wrote

the ability to transfer electricity has nothing to do with the speed, with which a pressure wave is transmitted. so - super conductor behaves the same as normal conductors or isolators.

and yes - if you apply more force on an object than this object can handle, it will shatter/bend/deform/vaporize/whatever.

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Smedleycoyote t1_j73s3zu wrote

Olympic horse show jumper Gem Twist was cloned after he retired from competition. Since he was gelded, he was not able to be bred, so he was cloned after his retirement. The clone, Gemini Twist, has never competed, but has been a part of a breeding program for years.

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atomfullerene t1_j73rqap wrote

It's not entirely clear to me what benefit there would be to a research team in covertly cloning a human. You obviously can't publish on it, which is the lifeblood of academic researchers. There's no obvious practical benefit to a for profit corporation, unless you want to, like, sell cloning services to rich people...in which case you have to advertise that you can do it. And it's not super clear why most governments would be interested in it.

It's certainly not impossible (especially for groups in the early stages who want to stay quiet until they have success), and after all it's a big world full of all sorts of people who try all sorts of things. I wouldn't be shocked. But I don't in general see a big motivation for people trying to covertly clone people. And generally speaking, people need motivation to spend a lot of money.

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CompetitiveYou2034 t1_j73ois3 wrote

Puncture the balloon, let it descend slowly, capture it via a plane trailing extended hooks.

Recap: a historical feat of pilot derring do!

Before we had high speed digital communication with our spy satellites, before we had digital cameras with megapixel lenses ....

1960s - 1980s, US spy satellites took high resolution pictures on actual film.
When a film canister was complete, or had time urgent info, it was ejected under a parachute.
A specially modified plane was waiting, that trailed a long wire with a v-shape, or hooks, which snagged the parachute canopy.
The plane reeled in the wire. Picked up the canister, and flew to have the film processed.
Example: KH-8 Gambit 3 satellite.

Same thing can be done with Chinese spy balloon.

The Chinese payload is a bigger than a film canister, but the capture plane can still fly it's payload for a soft-ish landing, dropped from say 50 feet onto a fireman's jumper rescue inflated balloon.

Seems very fitting, capture a payload from a balloon, drop it onto another balloon.

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thismightbsatire t1_j73nchp wrote

On March 31, 2022, the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium announced that they it had filled in the remaining gaps and produced the first truly complete human genome sequence.

I also recommend looking up epigenetic research and the studies on gene expression. It's extremely interesting.

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/fact-sheets/human-genome-project#:~:text=On%20March%2031%2C%202022%2C%20the,truly%20complete%20human%20genome%20sequence.

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CompetitiveYou2034 t1_j73mstz wrote

Important question regarding the Chinese spy balloon.

How does it report back info?

Surely it was not planned to store the info, and then continue round the world, or return flight over the Arctic or the Pacific Ocean!

We should physically capture it to determine it's communication method(s), encryption, etc.

If this was truly quote a civilian meteorological platform that went off course, the Chinese can have no complaint to our examining it.

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