Pff. You call that flying?

Oh like you can hit reverse.esrever tih nac uoy ekil hO

I remember it was in the new books section of the school library and I was attracted to it immediately and spent the day reading it instead of paying attention in my classes. I need to read it again. Thanks for bringing it up!

I read that ages ago. Back in high school, in fact (I’m 46). I don’t remember it except the chapter where time is a flock of birds that you have to try to catch to stay youthful. The children can catch them but always let them go and the adults can never catch them.

Wow.

Mercury arc valves remain in use in some South African mines and Kenya (at Mombasa Polytechnic - Electrical & Electronic department).

Amazing how we’re still using such old technology in some places when we have semiconductors.

That said, a microscope that generates its own light without electricity could be quite useful…

The Vikings expanded throughout Russia by using the Volga as a highway.

I think the writers just couldn’t bear it.

I don’t know that you could necessarily develop the wheelbarrow without first having the concept of the wheeled cart.

Wheeled carts are not very practical without draught animals to pull them. And the one place they had animals like that, in South America, llamas and the civilizations that utilized them lived in the mountains where wheeled carts aren’t practical either.

They say that Native Americans never developed the wheel. They clearly did. For sick dog skateboard tricks.

There’s an article about it in the New York Times which apparently goes into much more detail, but I don’t have a subscription- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/science/silence-sound-hear.html

It is excerpted in this Slashdot post, however, and that may give you enough information to understand it better: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/2343221/silence-is-a-sound-you-hear-study-suggests

To sum up, it’s not about total silence, it’s about perceiving gaps in louder sounds as “sound” rather than the lack of sound.

Or is it… EeeeeeEEEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEeeEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEEEE

I remember how in The Matrix movies, humans blocked out the sun to stop the computers from taking over. Looks like we’re going to ask them whether or not that’s a good plan first in our timeline.

Not the science we asked for, but the science we need.

Great. Capitalism literally makes you stupid.

I just did some Googling and apparently, that is a more recent development (at least for physics, medicine and chemistry). Science Nobel laureates used to be young, or at least much younger, but now they are skewing much older. This article discusses it: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899

I think once you win a Nobel, it’s okay to rest on your laurels.

Fun fact re the parasitic lice: Our head lice evolved with us, but we inherited pubic lice from gorillas much later.

I’m not saying a human and a gorilla got down together, but that’s a lot more fun than thinking some idiot slept in a gorilla nest.