Essentially I made a piece of jewelry containing a concentrated solution of fluorescent protein. It began as a sterile solution and a sanitized glass ampule, but a mishap during the final step sealing it up (with me breathing over top) may have unfortunately introduced some contamination.

I didn't include any toxic preservatives like sodium azide for safety reasons in case it ever breaks.

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Great point. Thanks for bringing it up

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Sorry, I misunderstood your use of the term ampule. I figured that your sample of bacteria was in the ampule rather than your uranium was encapsulated in glass.

In any case your work will be done with a weak gamma emitter which will probably work damnably slowly.

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Boiling point of oil is much higher than water. This means when we cook something in oil it can be subjected to much hotter temperatures than water. The sizzling and popping of things in fry oil is from water boiling away.

Same principle with pressure cookers and air fryers - cook it with a medium much much hotter than boiling water can

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The concept is called Duty Cycle.

We have a 10W of power going through a load for 10% of the time for 1W apparent load over time

It's very easy to turn switches on and off but much harder to continuously vary parameters of a circuit. It can be done but requires more moving parts (sometimes literal moving parts)

Generally speaking it is better to have continuous (analog) control over the system as fast switching creates voltage &/or current spikes in devices which will deteriorate them over time. That being said, a lot of devices don't care about those things and we can change our rate of change during the switching to also minimize damages

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First, I love this post and this is why I follow the sub.

Second, are you performing any experiments that have been, potentially, been contaminated?

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On the topic of spherical vs disk... do elliptical galaxies eventually collapse into spiral disks? It's a question that's always had confusion about it since spiral galaxies form by themselves but ellipticals form from collisions; if undisturbed, would spherical orbits always eventually collapse into disks (albeit perhaps taking vast amounts of time), or is it actually physically possible and statistically likely to have perfectly stable spheres that never decay?

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The Sun formed from a collapsing molecular gas cloud, which itself had some net angular momentum. As the rotational velocity of this collapsing gas cloud increased due to conservation of angular momentum, it flattened out into the circumsolar disk.

It was in 1950 that Jan Oort first suggested that comets originated from a distant, sparse, spherical cloud. He proposed that comets were born in the circumsolar disk, in plane with the planets, before being perturbed by the gas giants and ejected into their spherical distribution. Subsequent studies of the orbits of comets and potential perturbations from passing stars strongly supported the existence of the Oort cloud, which was necessary because it is practically impossible to observe. J.G. Hills advanced the theory in 1981, suggesting that there exists an inner Oort cloud, now also dubbed the Hills cloud, that explains the mix of showers of short-axis comets and individual long-axis comets. The Hills cloud would be significantly denser than the Oort cloud, and works like this one used simulations to show first that it is indeed possible to get an Oort cloud from comets formed in the outer planetary region of the circumsolar disk due to combined perturbations by the galactic tide and gas giants, and second that the inclination of orbits only becomes random (spherical) beyond 5,000 AU due to the influence of passing stars and gas clouds.

So the much denser Hills cloud, which starts around 3,000 AU, is actually roughly torus-shaped like you expect of the Oort cloud. However the outer Oort cloud, which did likely start out in the orbital plane of the solar system, has probably been scattered by the combined effect of initial scattering by gas giants, and then further perturbation by extrasolar objects.

Tunneling is when the wavefunction of a quantum system is nonzero in a region of space that would be classically forbidden.

In other words, it's when there's a possibility to find a particle in a region of space that would be impossible in classical mechanics.

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A bit later in the same chapter he says "[...] but it serves to aknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation", and "The evidence that accidental mutilations can be inherited is at present not decisive". Oh, and the first two chapters are dedicated to breeding and human selection, and he legit says "if you went to a breeder and explain our theory about extinct variants being the ancestors of their cattle, they'll laugh at your face".

It seems to me that he understood the basics, but the scientific community was still divided and colecting evidence was quite hard at the time.

It's not a bad hypothesis at all, there is solid basis to proposing that it exists, its just that how would you go about confirming it?

The logic is that comets are inherently not a stable phenomena, a single comet can't keep going for geological time periods. So somehow you need to have a mechanism for new comets to appear, there needs to be some sort of reservoir of potential comets yet to become comets. If you do a bit of statistics based on that idea you end up with the model of Oort cloud that we have now.

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