I’ve been reading a lot of Trek related stuff lately, but this it just a bizarre case of reality catching up to fiction: Glass breakthrough.
Taken from a comment on sclerotic_rings.
(Incidentally, I don’t want to even think about gigapascals…)
Tag: interesting
Lactic Acid: A Good Thing?
Heard a story on KCRW this morning. Apparently lactic acid might not be responsible for muscle fatigue after all (as my high school biology class taught). The connection was made because lactic acid was found in fatigued muscles, but recent research suggests that it may prevent muscle fatigue. It turns out that if lactic acid is removed from overworked muscle fibers, they actually stop working.
Of course, it is probably responsible for the burn you get while exerting.
(It’s kind of like when I learned that a fever was actually an immune system technique to fight infection, and not something the infection did itself.)
The things you see on LJ…
A couple of interesting items:
First, from metaquotes: Posted on the fridge at Xavier’s School for the Gifted (metaquote thread)
Next, sclerotic_rings on prosthetics that don’t just mimic the body, specifically artificial heart pumps designed with the fact the important part isn’t the method by which the heart pumps blood, but the fact that it keeps it circulating. We have plenty of experience with simpler ways to pump fluids than by imitating heart movements, such as, in this case, a constantly rotating impeller. What’s interesting is that people with this pump have no pulse!.
Dinosaur Flambe
Here’s an interesting theory: What if it didn’t take months of impact-caused “nuclear” winter to kill off all the dinosaurs? A new report suggests that the impact itself would have released so much heat, it would have flash-burned all life on land within hours. Only those animals protected by, say, the ocean (fish), or rivers (crocodiles), or underground burrows (small mammals) would have survived.
It doesn’t explain the death of aquatic dinosaurs, or (to my mind) the survival of birds, but it’s at least interesting. (As with all fly-in-the-face-of-accepted-theory theories, some skepticism is required. But hey, people used to think that the idea of asteroid-impact extinction was far-fetched.)
It’s a scary idea. Most disaster epics are at least in part about what comes after the disaster. Who lives, what they have to face, how they go on. From Noah to the Day After Tomorrow. Human beings can survive a nuclear winter. Not in as large numbers, not necessarily with civilization intact, but it’s at least possible. If you’ve got only minutes to hours, you’d better have Jor-el and a rocket – or a hell of a lot of bomb shelters – because the world is going bye-bye.
Oh, if you have a chance (and can turn on the sound), check out the DAT link: NPR did a review, but they decided it would be more fun to send their science correspondent than a movie critic!