exchemist

They travel in mobile objects like luggage, clothing etc. Bed bugs are most likely to be found where there are a lot of people passing through with their own possessions, e.g. in hotel rooms. So you are most at risk of importing them into your house when you have been staying away somewhere or when a traveller stays with you.

People. They suck blood, right? You just have to get rid of them. Professional pest control job, probably. Don't muck about.

Pre-owned by a French medieval knight with a passing resemblance to John Cleese, I presume…

No, “pure energy” is Star Trek, not physics. As I say, energy is a property of a physical system, not “stuff” with an independent existence. But a physical system can include fields as well as matter, for instance electromagnetic radiation, which as you say is massless. To account for that you need the long form of Einstein’s equation, dealing with entities that are moving relative to the observer. E=mc2 only deals with things at rest. The long form is: E2 = (mc2)2 + p2c2, in which p is momentum. For systems at rest relative to the observer p=0, so the 2nd term vanishes and you get good old E=mc2. But for massless EM radiation, m=0. Then it becomes the 1st term that vanishes and you are left with E=pc. So yes, light has momentum, even though it has no mass. We observe this actually, in the form of “radiation pressure”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure 🙂

No it doesn't, actually. This is a common misunderstanding. m denotes mass, not matter and what the equation says is that a system with a certain amount of energy will have a corresponding mass. i.e. BOTH mass and energy at the same time. One is not converted into the other. Mass and energy are both properties of physical systems of various kinds. Neither mass nor energy is a thing in its own right. You can't talk about energy without saying the energy of what.

Ballocks.

Quite. Confess I'm baffled by the angry response. There seems to be a confusion between individual animals and breeds. None of this stuff can change an animal that is already living, obviously.

This is ridiculous. There is all the difference in the world between killing creatures and just being careful not to bring yet more of them into existence in the future. If we have bred intrinsically unhealthy varieties of animal, we should stop it. Stop them procreating in ways that perpetuate the unhealthy outcome. In nature, such unhealthy creatures would fail to breed well and would die out anyway, because of natural selection. It is only by interfering with nature that we have been able to create them. To take your dog example, we should not allow one of these unhealthy dogs to mate with another of the same type. We should make sure they are used only to breed mongrels. The mongrels will have a better chance of being healthy and, over time, the unhealthy breed will vanish, all without needing to kill a single dog.

Ah yes of course, the enol form will be aromatic while the keto one is not.

Culling is killing. That is quite different from not allowing an animal to breed.

I agree. It's a carbonyl group, sure, but it's an amide rather than a ketone, I should have thought, as the carbonyl is joined to N. Though perhaps not a real amide, since the lone pair on the NH group may be participating in the aromatic ring structure, i.e. sp2 hybridised, which would not be the case with a regular amide. Mind you, it's not clear to me whether cystosine really is aromatic. It seems to me it would only be aromatic if the carbonyl is strongly polarised, to C⁺-O⁻ , since for aromaticity you would want only 6 electrons in the π system (Hückel's Rule). But I'm very rusty on this stuff. Maybe someone more up to date can comment.

Genocide is quite the wrong term. You just forbid the breeding of animals that are congenitally unhealthy and let them fade away through lack of offspring. A breed is not a living being. It is a class of individuals. Genocide involves killing every individual of the breed, or race. That is quite different.

I don't see any point in "restoring" or rectifying mistakes in selectively bred domesticated animals. For such animals the remedy is simple, surely? Stop breeding them. That applies to breeds of dog, or battery hens that can't stand up, or what have you. It seems to me this is a fake technology, producing pastiches, that is being hyped as something it is not. A bit like LLM AI. Or quantum computing. These are all techie ways to fleece gullible investors, by means of promises far beyond what is anywhere near to being achieved.

To be honest I think this is all hype , from yet another Trumpy technofascist, in this case this guy Ben Lamm who runs (the modestly named) Colossal Biosciences. They are not recreating an extinct species, just playing around with the grey wolf's genes to simulate some superficial characteristics of the extinct dire wolf. Lamm talks far right shit, for instance claiming, absurdly, that there is a law in the UK that only negative news must be reported, and that wind turbines generate more CO2 emissions than they save*. He is an admirer of Musk. I would not trust this charlatan further than I could throw him. I would not be at all surprised to find he has some "Boys from Brazil" meisterplan up his sleeve for eugenic tinkering with human beings. (By the way, the urban "sky rats" are actually rock doves, one variety of pigeon that is well-adapted to living where there are buildings. The wood pigeon is a quite different and far more attractive creature.) per article by Henry Mance in this weekend's edition of the FT.

What redshift deviation would you expect to see?

Ah yes you're right. The post being quoted appears, but not its author.

This is hardly a new idea. Using rotation to simulate gravity has been a staple of sci-fi for decades. There was an exercise centrifuge in Kubrick's 2001, released in 1968.

What test would you propose to distinguish your idea from modern physics?

You seem to have fixed both this and the picture issue. Well done and many thanks.

Hmm, I might take out a subscription to the Atlantic. As a concerned European, I think I need a reliable source of commentary on these shenanigans.

Yes that looks a lot better. Though I see the entire Applied Chemistry sub-forum still displays my two-fingered salute to @TheVat , for his crap joke about antimony 😁.

Many thanks.

What's a hamburger menu? By the way, I'm really finding the apparent obsession of the new software with pictures annoying. It seems to privilege pictures over text, as if we were small children. This is meant to be a discussion forum, where we communicate complex ideas in words. For example, two pictures I added semi-seriously to threads now appear prominently at the head of the threads concerned, as if they are the most important thing the thread contains. It's a ridiculous, clickbaity style. The pics (or, for the most part, empty boxes for pics) also take up a lot of room on the screen, requiring more scrolling to see what contributions have been made to the forum. I may be being an old fuddy-duddy but I think it would be great if we could get rid of this feature.

😁

Eh? If peasant is a term of respect in China, why would they be accusing him of being disrespectful?