Cool science stuff

Scientific progress goes boink.

Again.

 

Oops.

 

Failure is a significant part of scientific progress. Stuff doesn't always work the way you think it will. You test it, it fails, you figure out why and fix it.

 

Couldn't stick the landing.

 

At least it missed the other rocket on the pad.

 

Announcer said they were down under 1.5 kilometers about 10 seconds before the thing crashed. My guess is faulty altimeter.
Looked to me also like only one engine fired, but it wouldn't have saved the rocket that low.

 

This is wild.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4adpv9/us-navy-has-patents-on-tech-it-says-will-engineer-the-fabric-of-reality

 

ARABS INNN SPAAAAACE!

The United Arab Emirates' Hope Enters Orbit Around Mars - Sky & Telescope

 

Why does time move only forward? Well, an experiment could indicate it's caused by localized time symmetry violations. Weird stuff.

Physicists to look for quantum time dilation inside nuclear reactor

 

Any excuse to post a couple of my favorite clips from Wonders of the Universe.

 

The quantum time theory being tested in the reactor disputes the notion espoused in those videos that the arrow of time is caused by the second law of thermodynamics.

 

Next thing ya know they’ll find the actual Camelot.

An ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded 900 years ago, tells of the wizard Merlin leading men to Ireland to capture a magical stone circle called the Giants’ Dance and rebuilding it in England as a memorial to the dead.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account had been dismissed, partly because he was wrong on other historical facts, although the bluestones of the monument came from a region of Wales that was considered Irish territory in his day.

Now a vast stone circle created by our Neolithic ancestors has been discovered in Wales with features suggesting that the 12th-century legend may not be complete fantasy.

Its diameter of 110 metres is identical to the ditch that encloses Stonehenge and it is aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise, just like the Wiltshire monument.

A series of buried stone-holes that follow the circle’s outline has been unearthed, with shapes that can be linked to Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars. One of them bears an imprint in its base that matches the unusual cross-section of a Stonehenge bluestone “like a key in a lock”, the archaeologists discovered.

Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at University College London, told the Guardian: “I’ve been researching Stonehenge for 20 years now and this really is the most exciting thing we’ve ever found.”

The evidence backs a century-old theory that the nation’s greatest prehistoric monument was built in Wales and venerated for hundreds of years before being dismantled and dragged to Wiltshire, where it was resurrected as a second-hand monument.

Geoffrey had written of “stones of a vast magnitude” in his History of the Kings of Britain, which popularised the legend of King Arthur, but which is considered as much myth as historical fact.

Parker Pearson said there may well be a “tiny grain” of truth in his account of Stonehenge: “My word, it’s tempting to believe it … We may well have just found what Geoffrey called the Giants’ Dance.”

The discovery will be published in Antiquity, the peer-reviewed journal of world archaeology, and explored in a documentary on BBC Two on Friday presented by Prof Alice Roberts.

A century ago the geologist Herbert Thomas established that the spotted dolerite bluestones at Stonehenge originated in the Preseli hills of Pembrokshire where, he suspected, they had originally formed a “venerated stone circle”.

The newly discovered circle – one of the largest ever constructed in Britain – is virtually a stone’s throw (3 miles) from the Preseli quarries from which the bluestones were extracted before being dragged more than 140 miles to Salisbury Plain some 5,000 years ago.​

Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales — The Guardian