exchemist

Brilliant. 😆

Hmm, Project Anchor. Missing W perhaps?😁

Lack of any evidence for its physical existence, I suppose. Pauli described the pilot wave concept as an "uncashable cheque", as it makes no observable predictions that distinguish it from regular QM. As it has no predictive value it seems to add nothing as a scientific model and can thus be dispensed with on the basis of Ockham's Razor.

Senile. 25th amendment?

This isn't science news.

Ah yes, the natural F trumpet, a bastard to play I imagine, but can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. But I love the duet between the violas in the 6th. As with the alto voice there is something earthily sexy about it, compared to the violin. And that off the beat 3rd movement is almost impossible not to dance to.

According to Wiki these worms concentrate Cu in their bodies to a surprising degree, as it would normally be toxic. I wonder if this adaptation may be related to them living in mud and thereby being exposed to a lot of minerals from finely divided sediments.

How about Brandenburg 6? My favourite of the set, I think, though 3 runs it close.

Dead right. The actual paper is here: https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385(22)00153-9?utm_source=EA from which it can be see that this is Cu²⁺, acting as a binding agent by complexing with 4 imidazole units. The key structure appears to be shown here: Looks like another case of lazy journalism, leading to a misleading impression that these things have Jaws-like metal teeth when they don't. I'm not sure what "totally metal" is supposed to mean, but "containing 10% copper ions" wouldn't be as clickbaity.

Hoho, he'll be getting a few unsolicited pizza deliveries at home.

People in general no longer necessarily live in the same town as their parents. The children look for the best work opportunity and establish their families where they find it, while the parents often move when they retire, somewhere more rural, somewhere with good climate or whatever. It's not realistic to expect parents and adult children to live in the same household or only a few streets away.

What hasn't been eaten by the worm, you mean?

My father at the end of his life used to pee in a bottle, which was sometimes emptied in a sink rather than down the toilet. I still think a fridge is a more reliable test than a toilet.

Good point. The app can't react if the battery is flat. I like the fridge door idea because just about everyone living anywhere will open a fridge at least once in a 24hr period, even if they are ill and confined largely to bed. Seems there are such things on the market: https://www.agespace.org/tech/elderly-monitoring-services

Well, stuff does have to be paid for, you know. 😉

Oh that's interesting. So the phone app reacts if it is not moved for 12 hrs. That's very good - seems to do the job nicely. I might keep that in mind for a few years from now, to alert my son. But that immediately raises the question of what the extra benefit is of this Chinese app.

What's the point of alerting emergency services to someone who has been dead for 48hrs? Much more useful, surely, would be an app that notifies a keyholder if the fridge door has not been opened for, say, 12hrs.

Hmm, not sure what FAG ductwork means in a US context😳. Does this mean a ducted warm air system is common in the US, rather than hot water radiators? I think @studiot is the person with experience of transitioning to a heat pump system. I explored it a bit but was told there wasn't a big enough heat pump for a house like mine so I'd need a supplemental boiler on top, at which point I gave it up. I was also given conflicting advice about whether a heat pump could work with the existing radiators, which are designed for a gas-fired hot water system. Some said yes, but others said that heat pumps put out heat at a lower temperature (in order to stay efficient) so bigger radiators are needed. That for me would be the kiss of death as I have about 20 of them spread across 3 floors. Also I've been told the system needs to run all day, not just run on a timer for periods when the house is occupied. Everyone says heat pumps work well with underfloor heating pipes, but that is really suitable for new builds, not retrofitting to a Victorian place like mine. The steam (haha) seems to have gone out of the UK government's earlier talk of encouraging a switch to heat pumps. It may be that age of our housing stock makes it too hard to implement for many people. But for new houses it ought to be mandatory - and I think it will be in a few years' time.

Yes, electricity is typically 4 x the cost of gas in the UK. This is historically understandable, due to the far greater infrastructure needed to generate and distribute electricity and of course the fact that a lot of it is generated with an efficiency of <50% from fossil fuel. However what seems criminal nowadays is that the development of renewable generation, and the investment this necessitates in the distribution network, is all loaded onto electricity bills, while the legacy fossil fuel we are all trying to reduce dependence on incurs none of these costs. It's a political hot potato of course, as in the UK most people use gas for heating and we can't have elderly poor people freezing to death in their homes because they can't pay the gas bill. But I feel we really do need to start cross-subsidising since at the moment all the incentives are to retain the old gas boiler.

This is not about virtual particles though. It is standard undergraduate level chemical QM, involving bog-standard quantum systems, like vibrating chemical bonds or electronic states in atoms and molecules. As I said previously, although the idea of zero point energy often gets popularly associated with the energy of the vacuum, virtual particles popping in and out of existence and that weird QFT stuff, it is actually quite general to all kinds of mundane quantum system. Here's a simplified diagram of the energy well of a chemical bond between 2 atoms. The vibrational energy this system can have is restricted to certain quantised values, E₀ , E₁, E₂ etc. Notice that E₀ is not at the bottom of the well. That means there is still some kinetic energy left in the ground state - it is still vibrating a bit, in effect. You can't get that bit of energy out because it is already in the lowest allowed state. That is zero point energy, which the molecule will still have even at absolute zero. (The animation about the photon is just to point out if it doesn't have the correct energy it can't excite the vibration to the next level up. This is not important for the present discussion, it was just on the first decent diagram I found to copy.)

UK energy costs are ~6p/kWh for gas and ~25p/kWh for electricity: https://energyguide.org.uk/average-cost-gas-kwh/ https://energyguide.org.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk/ So I suppose someone in the UK with a house like mine but no gas supply could end up paying £8k/yr which would be £670/month. But that’s still nowhere near the case in the BBC article.

These videos are all crap, because of the lack of supporting explanation of what exactly we are seeing. As far as I can see from a quick internet search, there are no bioluminescent lizards. However if the lizard is being illuminated by a UV lamp, it could be fluorescing. But with no explanation, it could be anything, or just faked up for internet clickbait.

I agree with others there is something odd about these numbers. I live a large 3 storey Victorian house in London, with poor insulation. My energy costs (gas and electricity) are of the order of £2.5-3k/yr * . It seems amazing that this person spends that every 2 months. Does she live in a mansion? Or in a flimsy wooden hut in Alaska? It is also very odd that the bill is said to have tripled. What kind of energy utility can get away with tripling energy bills? It's absurd. Is this perhaps some computer error that hit the headlines and the BBC has credulously picked it up without questioning it? *~30,000kWh, of which ~28,000kWh gas and ~ 2,000 kWh electricity.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sub-quantum". The ground state is just the bottom rung of the energy ladder for every quantised system. For instance the electron in the 1s orbital of the H atom is in the ground state, with a residual kinetic and potential energy that cannot be reduced. The ground vibrational state of a diatomic molecule still has residual kinetic and potential energy that cannot be reduced. And so on. There is sometimes a misconception that ZPE applies only to the vacuum. Vacuum ZPE is indeed a somewhat mysterious feature of quantum field theory. However ZPE itself is far more general and applies to everything quantised, in principle. (Though as it happens the ground rotational state of a diatomic molecule has no zero point energy, because of how the maths works out for quantised rotation).

The point is that the energy of the ground state (the zero point energy) cannot contribute to temperature, as there is no lower state and therefore this energy can never be extracted. It is the energy that still remains AT absolute zero. Absolute zero, remember, is just the lowest temperature you can get, i.e. there is no lower temperature. Lowering the temperature of a system in which every degree of freedom was in the ground state would require extracting heat from it - which would mean getting it to a state lower in energy than the ground state - a contradiction in terms. So the residual energy of the ground state has nothing to do with why you can't get to absolute zero. That's simply a matter of not being able, in practice, to extract 100% of the extractable energy (which is the energy of states above the ground state).