Stealth/invisibility stuff. I know some senior Tankies who would make their undergarments very sticky indeed about that. Goodness knows what the Navy’s and RAF’s undercrackers would be like. Almost entirely full of jelly I suspect.
Also very handy for dealing with incoming fast-moving items. The beauty of phase-conjugation is that it sends a beam back along exactly the path it has followed up to that point, with the phase reversed so that any optical aberrations are corrected on the way. It got really interesting when it was discovered that phase-conjugate mirrors could simultaneously be configured as amplifiers. So imagine you shone a laser at an incoming missile. Some of the laser beam which hit the missile would be scattered back down to the ground. On its way to the ground it would be badly distorted by all the irregularities in the air. But if you could reflect it off a conjugator on the ground then you might a) be able to amplify its power up a thousand million times and b) have that power travel back to the missile through the messy air, with all the air’s mess corrected on the way. So the whole of the beam’s (now enormous) power would hit the missile. None would pass it by. Neat, eh ? “Where do I buy one ?” you can hear them saying …
VB
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Jim’s got them in his tweeters.
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More cells in your body than stars in our galaxy, or galaxies in the known universe and most contain more than 2 metres of DNA. Mind blowing
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Just to be clear, I don’t believe in a God. But when it comes to the argument that a God must exist because nature is just too fantastically complex to have happened by accident then, so far, the best supporting evidence that I’ve seen for that is DNA. Every detail of its multi-level structure - the way it’s coiled, and the coils are looped, and the loops are folded over one another - matters. The DNA in every single cell is being damaged by background chemistry 10,000 times a day, and there are multiple mechanisms inside the cell which are repairing that damage 10,000 times a day. It is almost literally unbelievable.
VB
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…and a scientist responds by trying to understand it even if they never will. The religious however…
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Makes you think that it may not have actually been an “accident” 
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Not sure it is possible to overstate how much of a good thing this could be, even with comparatively low efficacy figures currently.
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I wonder if the local anti vaccination brigade will protest this, oh hang on, it’s not in America.
It would be a godsend for most of the poorest economies on the planet. One of the best predictors for poverty at the nation level is distance to the equator. The closer the country is the more likely it is to be extremely poor. The best explanation for this is malaria as it renders investment in education, healthcare and private capital infrastructure largely pointless. Few will invest in education (with a 20-year payoff) if your life expectancy is short. Reducing the toll malaria takes would have massive potential benefits. The Gates foundation (among others) is making great steps to address the need for a cure…
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Absolutely.
But does the planet need more humans?
(not wishing badly to any of them)
Yes, soylent green isn’t going to make itself.
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No, and I was not suggesting that. On the other hand it would be nice if those already here did not have to live in horrendous conditions.
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Reducing child mortality has the effect of actually reducing population growth overall, if you can be fairly sure your children will make it you don’t need to try and beat the statistics.
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And you might educate all your kids and not just stick them on the farm as early as possible and marry the girls off at 12.
Girls should choose when to get married.
Does not always go right.
But their choice important.
I have a science question; for a bonus, it’s about coffee.
I recently bought an Aeropress. In this you brew in a cylinder that has a flat round filter at the bottom, then press down a piston to force the coffee through the filter into the cup.
The resultant grounds are never flat, but a humped shape:
Why is it this shape?
less resistance to ‘de-compressing’ in the centre than at the sides?
Weird. Mine always comes out with a very well - defined hockey puck shape.
More fibre in your diet might be a good thing…
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