Science stories of the week

I’ve read that some think love is a placebo. (Now, we have the thread back on track) ^_^

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

and now
a brief musical interlude


Love is":
Hard to get
Impossible to hold
Straight as an arrow
Like a burnin' fuse
In the long cold dawn
By the side of the road
A hopeless case
A perfect thing

Love is ... what you want it to be
Love is ... heaven to the lonely
Show me what you want me to do
Cause love is what I've got for you

Close my eyes
Search the stars
Cry for help
Wake up cold
You're in my system
Under my skin
Raw emotion
Please don't go

Love is .... What you want it to be
Love is .... Heaven to the lonely
Show me what you want me to do
Cause love is what I've got for you

Can't live on promises
Won't sleep with lies
Don't understand the things you say
Til I read 'em in your eyes
Gotta run on instinct, gotta go by feel
Gotta trust my senses
To know if it's for real

Love is ... what you want it to be
Love is ... heaven to the lonely
Show me what you want me to do
Cause love is what i've got for you
Love is...

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Haha (we both know that I'm your favorite anyway but we won't say anything). Earlier you asked if I was still painting and I said not lately. Today I went out and the wind had blown the lattice work out of a short "wall" or "fence" that comes off of my garage onto the patio. It's just a little privacy wall.

The lattice work was old anyway and the wind made most of it fall over so I just tore it out. So now I have the rectangular framework for the short privacy wall but it does nothing now as you just look right through it.

I could just tear it down altogether as I don't really need it but one post goes into the cement patio and it would probably leave a hole. I could just replace the lattice work. If I have any larger piece of plywood in the garage I'm thinking about priming that and then painting a picture of lattice work with a large potted flower in front and then nail that over the opening. Trompe l'oeil I suppose.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sun-solar-storms-earth-havoc-space-weather-forecasts

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/541825-world-on-brink-of-fourth-wave-of-coronavirus

 

Yes. Premature slackening of control measures is just the thing to give this thing legs, once more.

Here in the UK we have just let the schools go back this week. We are going to wait and see what effect that has on R before loosening any more controls and then go in stages, measuring the effects of each relaxation before moving on to the next. It looks to me as if at long last Bozo has realised he can't win this war by feel-good speeches and pandering to the political Right. We have about 25m vaccinated now (single dose). That's the 40% most vulnerable of the population. But that is nowhere near enough to get R below 1, especially with these new variants about. And the progress of vaccination through the population will soon slow, when it becomes time to give the 2nd dose to all those that have had their first.

The good news is summer is on its way, when the transmission rate drops anyway, due to people being outside, leaving windows open etc. We need to keep up the vaccination rate and have a supplementary vaccine, targeted against the new variants, ready to roll in Autumn.

 

I don't know if that is true, about transmission rates dropping when the temps get warmer outside. I live in the southeast part of the US, and it's hot more often than not - although, temps have been a nice change of cool lately, and the death rate stats were high, here. But, comparing being indoors and outdoors in terms of virus transmission, yes being outdoors in warmer temps would seem to lessen the spread rate. We'll have to wait and see. Hopefully, a fourth wave, should it come, won't affect as many people since more are becoming vaccinated. (Although, I read yesterday that the vaccine doesn't prevent recipients of getting the virus and spreading it,they likely just won't show symptoms.)

 

From what I have read it is not temperature per se, but the amount of interaction people have in enclosed spaces that reduces when the weather warms up after the winter. If it gets so hot or humid that people once more retreat indoors, then you can expect transmission to go up again. There seems to be evidence accumulating that open air, or even open windows so as to permit air circulation, greatly reduces the spread.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...in-florida-shows-threat-to-u-s-covid-recovery

This fluctuating stat could be due to the fact that this is a popular time of year for tourism, and many from northern states are visiting. (and possibly bringing Covid with them)

 

More likely it is the lack of countermeasures, due to the nutcase in charge in Florida.

 

lol I read something that there are 1 million back logged cases of Covid currently in Florida. What?

I think the founding fathers may be tossing about in their graves, regretting this governor idea.

 

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-ladybug-warps-space-time.html

"Gravity is the weakest of all known forces in nature.'' But if gravity dominates such a large scale structure of the universe, how can we simultaneously consider that ...weak?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

It's effect is weak compared to the other forces which is why we don't have a Unified Theory to unite GR and Quantum Physics. It's so weak at those scales that it's not even a factor in most scenarios.

When you mess around with the Strong Force you get nuclear fusion. With the weak force you get nuclear decay. We know how strong the electro-magnetic force is. Gravity is weak by comparison.

 

I think it is not actually considered a force at all is it?

Are comparisons to the "other" forces in order in that case?

Do gravitational waves have more of the nature of a force than the existing gravitational field?

 

It's one of the 4 fundamental forces.

 

I have seen it written so many times that it is not a force.

Are you saying that this characterization is wrong ? (or that I have misunderstood what was being said?)

 

I'm no expert but I think it depends on whether you are talking in terms of General Relativity or the Standard Model of particle physics. In the latter it's a force.

 

I think these things are more properly called the four fundamental interactions rather than forces, but "forces" gets used as shorthand. As I understand it (though I don't pretend to be competent at GR), there is a still a gravitational interaction in GR, in that mass causes spacetime to curve, creating the effects we see as gravitational attractions, which can be modelled in terms of forces.

But maybe a real physicist would like to comment.

 

It is because there is no way to neutralise this interaction, so far as we know.

In electromagnetism you have +ve and -ve charges, which when they are in balance cancel each other out so that no net force remains. For instance if you bring an -(-ve) electron close to a (+ve) proton it gets "smeared out" all round the proton and cancels its +ve charge, giving you a hydrogen atom which is electrically neutral and thus exerts little* electromagnetic force on anything at longer range. Something similar happens when subatomic particles are brought together under the influence of the nuclear forces. So all these interactions get neutralised by bringing fundamental particles of matter together. So in practice you never get large collections of "bare", unbalanced, fundamental particles of matter.

But with gravitation, there is no neutralisation when particles of matter are brought together. On the contrary, the gravitational effect is made larger when particles clump together. You don't have +ve and -ve gravitational charges - or not as far as we know. So there is no process to limit the effect of gravitation, in the way that there is for all the other interactions.



* Though another atom brought close to it will feel an electromagnetic effect, potentially causing the atom to form a chemical bond with it. This further lessens the electromagnetic effect, so that there is almost none at all between a a pair of hydrogen molecules. Though there is still actually a tiny bit, which can be imagined as due to a flickering motion of the electrons about the protons, which causes tiny random imbalances of charge. These produce a tiny attraction between molecules, known as "dispersion" or "London" forces. This intermolecular attraction is the reason why gases condense into liquids and then solids at low enough temperatures.. Apologies for the digression into chemistry.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

You may have heard this before...
A funny way to get an appreciation of the weakness of the gravitational ''force'' is...

The gravitational force of the whole Earth cannot ''pull'' a small fridge magnet off a fridge door.
Use that same small magnet to pick pins off the floor against the ''pull'' of the whole Earth.