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PhazonLink posted:How the hell does stuff like that not get discovered sooner? Like shouldn't a room full of kids/a super computer "get" most chemicals? There are untold numbers of combinations of atoms and then we get into the insane math of their structure and pairing. Once you've put together something you can check and see if it's viable with some math, but marking off all the failures takes a lot of time. It's why protein folding crowdsourcing was popular a few years back, there's just so much stuff that any one thing could not possibly sift through it all with today's tech in any reasonable length of time.
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Jan 24, 2015 13:58
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Memento posted:Oh so it's just a component-rich-exhaust, no worries then. Will it have a lithobraking system to arrest forward movement as well? Lithobraking is always an option for experimental rockets. That and sudden midair disassembly, which sounds much more likely with this concept.
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Feb 11, 2015 04:27
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Tollymain posted:is that the sound you make when you realize you've synthesized it I would think that, or oh poo poo run.
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Feb 11, 2015 04:51
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Memento posted:Depends on what you want to do with the metal you mine. If the answer is "mine asteroids to deliver raw materials to processing and industrial centers on Earth", then no. Whoever says we need to do that is wrong and bad and wrong. Mine asteroids, ship the finished products back to Earth via safe and effective gravity drop. No sense polluting our planet any more than we need to.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:32
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Reverend Jake posted:Me, too. Wore it for two weeks until the skin sloughed off my finger thanks to an allergy. Now I've got boring old titanium. If your skin was coming off from that, I don't want to imagine what would happen if you wore a known source of all kinds of skin nastiness in susceptible individuals.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:40
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Memento posted:Safe isn't really a thing when you're lobbing house-sized chunks of metal at the surface. When you say "gravity drop", what you mean is "re-entry". In order to control where it landed, you need thrusters on the side of it, which become prohibitively expensive when you're talking about the size of the drop. Plus they're moving at speeds of up to 20 times the speed of sound at sea level. And they're not going to be able to be slowed down by aerodynamics like a space shuttle or Apollo capsule. What you're talking about is getting into the size of meteorite that caused the Tunguska event in 1908. Well I was more talking about using, you know parachutes and those bouncy balloons they use for missions to Mars. Throwing some cables around a block of tungsten and attaching enough parachutes to land it safely wouldn't be a big issue with all the carbon and silicate up there. Hell, if it turns out to be easy to make aerogel in micro G we can just coat the things in the stuff and we could even drop hard into the ocean instead. Note, I do not personally recommend dropping house sized chunks of metal anywhere. I was thinking more car sized.
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Jul 4, 2015 02:30
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I'm assuming the reason they didn't go through with it because there's no way to make it not violently explode when the passivation layer suddenly breaks loose on take off.
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Jan 12, 2016 17:14
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I don't know about that, there's at least one company that still makes the stuff, so there's got to be some people out there willing to work with the devil.
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Jan 12, 2016 17:30
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Mortimer posted:Recently I've been asked to work with a series of nerve agent simulants, mainly ones similar to sarin in IR Jesus Christ, simply saying that thing's name out loud might as well be a crime.
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Jan 15, 2016 04:49
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Phy posted:Nitroglycerin is, of course, an explosive. It's also a standard treatment for angina, where it acts as a potent vasodilator. I always wondered, how is it rendered nonexplosive? Or do angina sufferers just live with walking around with a pocket full of boom? It's less than half a milligram per pill for most patients. That's not much boom.
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Jan 15, 2016 19:25
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Well dynamite 'sweats' pure nitroglycerin... so he probably had to call the cops or the fire department.
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Jan 16, 2016 13:55
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Either way the things would still be flammable as hell, so a big enough spark or coals from pipe tobacco would have probably made the balls go up in flames quite nicely.
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Jan 17, 2016 21:28
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In general the flames from celluoid burn too fast to cause more than light burning unless you made pants out of it or something.
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Jan 18, 2016 18:30
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wdarkk posted:Those stores aren't subdivided much at all, so it's entirely possible that nobody knows where all the fire is. This, the layout varies depending on store size and the whims of local and regional management and once you're inside the building there aren't really any barricades for a fire, in fact, most of the things inside a Walmart you could use to build a barrier would themselves be flammable and thus useless for this purpose. Inside a big box store, the difference between 'minor property damage' and 'everyone inside is dead' with a fire is based entirely on location of initial blaze and response time. If they keep propane tanks indoors and those go up, everyone's dead. If they have the wrong fire extinguishers next to the consumer electronics or the household chemicals, everyone's dead. If the shoes catch on fire, everyone will wish they were dead. If there's a grease fire next to the deli, they're probably fine, but if the floor was waxed recently, not so much. Now, it's not easy to start one of those kinds of fires, but in a perfect storm of flammability you don't want to be anywhere near one.
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Feb 16, 2016 04:31
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zedprime posted:Who wants to make the documentary "Walmart: More insane than a German chemist?" Honestly, much like German chemists and bookstores, Walmarts remain relatively safe despite all the flammable things inside them because no one in their right mind would start a fire inside one, and in the case of Walmarts and bookstores, you have employees all over the drat place who are at least hopefully trained in fire safety.
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Feb 16, 2016 05:07
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Memento posted:I don't know the technical process of it well, but cooking meth probably requires an open flame, right? Fire starting yes, right mind, not so much. Depends, if you're doing the shake 'n bake the last thing you want is a fire. If you're cooking using one of the larger batch methods you'll need a heat source at some point. Also, whenever the police say 'meth lab' what they really mean is 'chemicals and paraphernalia for making methamphetamine'. The average consumer household is between three and four pieces away from being a meth lab by that definition, depending on what decongestants they stock and whether they have any automotive chemicals or camping fuels in the garage. This is one of the reasons why meth is so common in the Midwest, it's actually really easy (although dangerous) to make, although the toxic byproducts of meth production are nothing to sneeze at.
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Feb 16, 2016 05:35
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Toast Museum posted:Noah Webster had an axe to grind. And he used it to simplify spelling by cutting letters out wherever he could get away with it. Even American English is still a loving mess though and could use another pass.
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Feb 16, 2016 14:38
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Sticky Date posted:Yeah sorry about that, after I hit the post button I thought something like this might happen... China, India, some in the US, some in Europe. Some of the chemicals in this thread can't be safely transported so they have to be synthesized on site even if their precursors and their finished products (what people use them to make) are stable. In the US and Europe there are all kinds of safety regulations preventing companies from just dumping toxic poo poo in their backyard. Well, now anyway.
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Feb 16, 2016 23:10
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jetz0r posted:I don't think UF6 is being transported in the nuclear fuel casks. At that point in its life cycle, it's been depleted of the radioactive isotopes, and is "just" a highly reactive, toxic chemical. These pictures, especially the last one, make me extremely uncomfortable.
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Feb 18, 2016 00:50
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zedprime posted:Rust isn't necessarily bad, unless its the bad rust, and non-destructive testing has gotten pretty good at figuring out when its bad rust. It's not really the rust, more that the cylinders are being stored outside and just stacked on top of each other like that. I prefer my toxic waste stored deep below the ground in a location where it can't contaminate groundwater in the worst case scenario, thank you very much.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:14
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Phobophilia posted:The real question is, how much mercury ion is that generating Fun fact, scientists discovered about a decade that most dental amalgam formulas release tiny 'puffs' of mercury each time pressure is applied to them while chewing! 
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Mar 3, 2016 01:03
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Rorac posted:Crossposting, kind of, from a thread in D&D where the conversation a little while ago was on some raw milk law that I didn't give much of a gently caress about. Somebody mentioned HF and a link about what some incredibly stupid person did with it and uh When will humans learn not to stick things up their butts that aren't meant to go there? Not talking about sexy time stuff built with the express purpose of going up your rear end, I'm talking about homemade enemas and various random objects I've seen or read about people getting stuck all up in there. Also, reading that abstract was horrifying on its own, no way I'm reading the actual paper. 
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Mar 11, 2016 14:54
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Tunicate posted:The stuff he will work with is still fairly entertaining. Things anyone reasonable won't work with: magnesium anywhere near melting point.
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Mar 28, 2016 02:22
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Vitamins posted:Cody really is the greatest Well I'm fairly certain after watching that he's upped his likelihood of getting cancer by at least 10%. Plus he wants to perform backyard uranium extraction 
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Apr 1, 2016 21:14
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xthetenth posted:I'm kind of uncomfortable when somebody has to raise their voice to be heard over their geiger counter. That's normal, right? That is a perfectly normal reaction, yes. Especially when said counter is already calibrated to not tick on background radiation. Edit: taken to hilarious extremes here: http://www.atomic-robo.com/atomicrobo/v10ch4-page-20b Kwyndig has a new favorite as of 21:51 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 21:49
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Cumslut1895 posted:I held a depleted reactor rod once... My university was given a reactor by the US as part of the Atoms For Peace program back in the 50's. they eventually decommissioned the reactor and took it away, but left the fuel rods. they are significantly more radioactive than the background, but apparently safe to hold, if we washed our hands. Depleted uranium and other nuclear fuels are fairly safe from an exposure standpoint if you don't eat them/inhale them, at that point it's mostly alpha/beta decay with little of the high energy gamma emissions. That said, I wouldn't want to keep a spent fuel rod in my house, and keeping several pounds of uranium ore in a makeshift pig, even in a garage? Crazy town.
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Apr 2, 2016 01:25
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Adenoid Dan posted:Cadmium is another heavy metal that acts as an estrogen. As with uranium the other effects are more dangerous. Just recently they pulled some children's jewelry from a major retailer that was nearly 99% cadmium (it's cheap and shiny - this is not the first time this has happened). 99 percent cadmium? Why didn't they just make it out of lead if they hated kids so much.
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Apr 6, 2016 15:07
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Memento posted:That cadmium thing is loving insane. Where did they even get enough cadmium from to make jewelry out of it? Actually cadmium is usually a by product of zinc refining. If you have a ton of zinc to refine, you'll get some cadmium, usually.
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Apr 7, 2016 00:47
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Isn't Iridium so rare because there was basically none of it in the initial formation of the planet? I know Technetium basically doesn't exist on Earth because it's stupid radioactive and all natural deposits have since all decayed into its products, but Iridium isn't particularly radioactive.
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Apr 7, 2016 03:25
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It's like how pewter used to contain lead in it. It was easier to do it that way than a safe way and until relatively recently nobody cared if your paint or tiny metal people were toxic if you were stupid enough to put them in your mouth.
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Apr 7, 2016 15:24
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Ignimbrite posted:Something tells me it would also be very efficient at irradiating the living poo poo out of everything that went anything near the general direction of the exhaust Radiation is the least of your concerns, that much uranium gas would poison to death anything that so much as looked at the exhaust plume, also the rocket runs hot enough it would vaporize tungsten. It's the unholy trifecta of rocket designs: super efficient, super deadly, and super bad in the long run.
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Apr 11, 2016 14:29
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Zopotantor posted:Great, more reaction mass! If that's your reaction 'will destroy anything reasonable we can make the rocket out of' then you're secretly a rocket engineer, aren't you?
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Apr 11, 2016 20:58
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I think in Star Trek they get around that by saying warp drives don't cause relativistic effects, so something moving at .99c doesn't have near infinite potential kinetic energy trapped into its momentum if it's under warp. That shouldn't stop them from using gravity to hurl giant rocks at poo poo though.
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Apr 11, 2016 21:12
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xthetenth posted:Hurling giant rocks is the subject of a great bit of 40k fluff detailing the fuel and supplies it would take to get a rock and protect it until impact a long time later, and concluding with just shooting the planet being much cheaper. Well yeah, that's 40k, any competently defended world is already going to have giant cannons pointed at the sky to blow up incoming rocks because they might have Orks in them.
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Apr 11, 2016 21:21
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xthetenth posted:The platonic ideal of propulsion is sending the entire propulsion system rearwards at high velocity. The problem there is that the propulsion system would rapidly transform into a cloud of poisonous radioactive plasma that would also consume the craft. Now, if you could invent an propulsion system that could safely disintegrate into reaction mass and hurl itself away that would be fantastic... that design was not it though.
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Apr 12, 2016 00:56
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Platystemon posted:Sounds like it’s time to consider unreasonable materials. Even theoretical alloys of hafnium aren't strong enough, and using an alloy of one of the hardest metals to refine (because it's chemically almost identical to its good buddy zirconium) is already on the unreasonable scale.
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Apr 12, 2016 04:14
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There's always the chance you could cause a volcano if you don't do your appropriate underground surveying. Earthquakes, not so much.
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Apr 13, 2016 01:32
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Tom Swift, the world's most colossal blundering genius. You would think after the third or fourth time he invented something that went wildly out of control or exploded something they would lock him up, but nope. After this doomed adventure he immediately goes into space.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:34
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TheRagamuffin posted:I wonder how much of that slowdown is due to the protocol used. That might be an important part of the research for further and further exploration. Well there's a lot of problems when you get far enough out, there's signal attenuation, there's power loss from your RTG elements decaying (because you can't use solar), there's interference from the solar wind, there's whatever the hell is out past the heliopause. In an ideal world, NASA would be able to slap several redundant power supplies on a probe so it would have enough juice to give us a nice strong high bandwidth signal until end of lifetime. Short of inventing new data compression tools there's not a lot left on the software side to fix that can overcome the complex hardware issues. You can't mount a nice high power laser on a space probe because it would be too heavy and maybe your neighbors might think you're going to use it for less peaceful purposes, so you're stuck with radio and maybe microwave.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:36
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Phanatic posted:Pyrex kitchenware used to be made from borosilicate glass, too. Until they sold the name off and now it's just regular crappy soda-lime glass. Yeah that was super disappointing, Pyrex used to be a cut above for kitchenware, now it's fragile as hell.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:26
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