NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
>ask researcher if the lab is creepy or wet
>she doesn’t understand I pull out a diagram explaining what is creepy and wet
>she says “it’s a good lab sir”
>it’s wet
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
In any case, we should probably be prepared for a reality where many, many more actors get nukes. It’s been shown that an oscillating carbon nanotube will see a noticeable shift in period even if its mass changes by just that of a single proton which has vast implications for the future of uranium enrichment given sufficiently advanced nanotechnology. Depending on how many cycles it takes to discern 235 from 238, it might be possible to use a vast array of oscillating nanoscopic cantilevers to effectively sort molecules with Uranium into groups containing 100% of a certain isotope. This may be much less energetically and industrially intensive than conventional forms of enrichment, which means many more entities get nukes and we don’t know who builds them.
It’s worth keeping in mind that it’s *comparatively* easy to control who does and doesn’t produce nukes in large part because enrichment is very, very hard. Computation on the other hand has doubled in energy efficiency roughly every 2-3 years or less, an improvement of a trillion fold since their invention. If enrichment followed a trend just like that then yes it would actually become very very hard to regulate without draconian measures.
And even as hard as enrichment is now, we haven’t been able to stop everyone we wanted from doing that. Worth keeping in mind for AI, which is structurally harder in many ways.
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
this bare wafer sitting on optical breadboard "wafer level test setup" really shows how different industry or even same industry different era folks do things very differently.
here is another one: before LN became TFLN, bulk LN folks would scribe the chip/wafer name using a diamond scriber on the backside (now people do proper litho for labels and names), and when they inspect poling domains with HF etch (etch speed is different along crystal +z and -z), they put the wafer on a piece of paper, pour HF, and let its surface tension hold itself within the wafer.. maybe not everyone at the time was doing this cowboy style acid etch.
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
>science fiction is 50:50
gender war brainrotters go to hell. the rest of us are going to Fucking Space.
Books men like to read vs. Books women like to read:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The chart shows proportions of male vs. female Goodreads reviewers by genre from Thelwall (2017), not books men or women like to read overall. Goodreads users are ~75% female.
docslib.org/doc/13209003/r…
asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/as…
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Okay, before the doomsday people start speaking on this, I just wanted to say…
1. We never lost the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. What we’re doing is restoring ONE specific manufacturing capability that has been inactive for roughly 20 years. That’s it.
2. This announcement doesn’t mean we’re suddenly expanding our nuclear arsenal or preparing for World War III.
3. This is part of a long running effort to restore the ability to manufacture specialized materials and replace components that are ALREADY in our existing nuclear arsenal. It’s not a sudden decision that happened overnight to build an entirely new generation of nuclear weapons.
Thanks. 😊☢️
US restores key nuclear weapons manufacturing capability after 20 years.
NNSA has officially qualified @y12nsc to produce new “binary” material essential to the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
More here: energy.gov/nnsa/articles/us-…
ALT An intermediate product during the manufacturing of binary alloy, this “pencil” of depleted uranium and niobium will be melted into a homogenous ingot by a vacuum arc remelter.
ALT Two operators at Y-12 operate the vacuum induction melt furnace, allowing molten depleted uranium to flow from the crucible into the mold.
ALT An operator at Y-12 removes the crucible containing binary alloy from the vacuum arc remelter.
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Republicans: Fuck, I can't believe we lost the midterm
The Ukrainian war sublot:
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
Mass-produced steel rockets for the Atlas ICBM, in this restored 1962 USAF documentary:
youtu.be/BbvVgckQhgs
NERVA🇺🇸🇺🇦 retweeted
🪲🛸🐞Sustainable photonics aims to replace conventional optical materials with environmentally benign alternatives, yet its development is fundamentally constrained by the narrow intrinsic refractive-index variability of biopolymers. Here we show that a dense–porous periodic architecture yields nearly perfect optical reflection using only polysaccharides.
