MU69 is apparently the most distant object ever visited by a human spacecraft, which is cool AF but not nearly as cool as the fact that an astrophysicist named Dr. Brian May is processing the incoming photos.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
THE Bajau, a people of the Malay Archipelago, spend almost all of their lives at sea. They live either on boats or in huts perched on stilts on shallow reefs, and they migrate from place to place in flotillas that carry entire clans. They survive on a diet composed almost entirely of seafood. And to gather this they spend 60% of their working day underwater.
Webbed hands and feet? Nope ...
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the spleen, an organ that acts as an emergency reserve of oxygenated red blood cells
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The spleen scans showed that the Bajau’s are 50% larger than those of the Saluan—a difference unconnected with whether an individual was a prolific diver or one who spent most of his time working above the waves on a boat.
Do you believe that cells only come into being as a result of existing cells dividing - and that a cell was therefore 'alive' in some sense when its 'parent' was alive?
If you do, then it follows that every living cell in your body has been alive for billions of years.
Also, all the dead cells in your body (ones that have just this minute died) had been alive for billions of years until their recent demise.
Do you believe that cells only come into being as a result of existing cells dividing - and that a cell was therefore 'alive' in some sense when its 'parent' was alive?
I find your argument unpersuasive. A cell is alive before it comes into being? Cells have souls?
Are cells are only created by division ( I don't know - a question for TLR )? I suppose in one sense they're not because you read about bone marrow cells 'making' blood cells - is that creating them from scratch or splitting with modifications?
If they are, then you have to decide whether either, neither or both 'daughter' cells was/were previously alive - did the parent cell die in the process of splitting, or did it live on in one or both of the offspring? I suppose that's more of a philosophy question?
Well, one of the central tenets of the Cell Theory of Life is that all currently-existing cells arose through the division of preexisting cells. (Of course, at some point, the first cell(s) must have arisen by another means -- but that was a very, very long time ago.)
Some cells (e.g. stem cells) are undifferentiated cells that can produce more specialized cells when they divide. Thus, even though each one of us started out as a single, undifferentiated cell, there are more than 200 different cell types in an adult human's body.
So, it's trivially true that each cell that currently exists can be traced in an unbroken lineage back to cells that existed billions of years in the past.
In the same way, each and every one of us represents an unbroken lineage that extends back at least 4 billion years. Think of it: not even one of your ancestors failed to reproduce; if they had, you wouldn't exist.
So, every single thing that lives today is the result of an unbroken line of winners that stretches back some 4 billion years into the past.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
In the same way, each and every one of us represents an unbroken lineage that extends back at least 4 billion years. Think of it: not even one of your ancestors failed to reproduce; if they had, you wouldn't exist.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
I'm not a scientician (okay maybe I am a little bit), but it's hard to wrap my brain around something remaining as cool as room temperature while under that amount of pressure. I don't remember the exact relationship between pressure and heat (apart from what elevation does to cooking times, and why) but I feel like something under that amount of pressure should heat up. Is that a thing? I'm still just waking up.
I'm not a scientician (okay maybe I am a little bit), but it's hard to wrap my brain around something remaining as cool as room temperature while under that amount of pressure. I don't remember the exact relationship between pressure and heat (apart from what elevation does to cooking times, and why) but I feel like something under that amount of pressure should heat up. Is that a thing? I'm still just waking up.
Pressure alone isn't enough to make something hot. Think of the very deep ocean trenches - the water at the bottom is usually as cold, or colder than the water higher up.
Things might get hot while they're actually being compressed - this is particularly true of gasses - but once they're in a steady state there's no heat generated. While you're pumping gas into a high pressure cylinder (such as the ones used by scuba divers) you need to cool the cylinder down, but once it's at a steady high pressure, you can stand it in the corner of the room and it will just sit at ambient room temperature. If it didn't it would be a great way to heat your house for free in the winter without burning any fuel!
I'm not a scientician (okay maybe I am a little bit), but it's hard to wrap my brain around something remaining as cool as room temperature while under that amount of pressure. I don't remember the exact relationship between pressure and heat (apart from what elevation does to cooking times, and why) but I feel like something under that amount of pressure should heat up. Is that a thing? I'm still just waking up.
You totally are a bit of a scientficist.
What you've overlooked it that says that if you pressurise something, from a lower pressure to a higher pressure, other things being equal the thing will get hotter. It doesn't say high pressure things always stay hot. So if you supercool the thing and then supercompress it, you get room temperature (for appropriate values of super).