All your science in here

I will just look at the pretty pictures then!

Setting aside that it’s barely news, I welcome these guys - we really need as many rat-eating species cruising-around out there as possible…

…even calling it ‘invasive’ is marginal.

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Forcing it to look at a tape measure is NOT ON

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Evil Remoaners forcing it to learn the metric system :rage:

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How to win this debate: ‘You want gigantic horns extending into and around the garden but your wife likes gardening’.

A tenuous glimmer of hope.

r

Came across these in the woods. On the ground it looked like emerging fungus. When I moved a leaf obscuring them they were clearly attached to a leaf

Any ideas?

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Cheers, Only ever seen brown dried out versions or perhaps different species before

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Yes, the dried out ones are more often seen - I guess that they last a while before breaking down

Evri are bidding for the contract I believe

Where of course the items will disappear into the ether with Evri unable to explain what happened.

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I saw this today on BlueSky and had a read of the paper (link under screenshot).

Fuck.

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/74/12/812/7808595?login=false

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Oh well :unamused:

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Some fucking speech or other about woke asteroids within a week.

I hope it kills everyone, badly.

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AA invitation sent. Pretty sure this guy is twinned with @Valvebloke

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I noticed Mark Pauline (Survival Research Labs) in the credits. I first came across him about 45 years ago when my older brother studying at Berkeley made a documentary about him as part of his journo masters. It’s worth looking at some of the mechanized lunacy he’s been involved with.

Yup. That’s the sort of thing I did. Only not for that purpose.

His slo-mo videos show what looks like a projectile, presumably trailing a fine guide wire, fired towards the target before the main discharge happens. That works, but if your target is fast-moving then it will have moved somewhere else before the projectile gets to it. Some friends of mine looked at forming a guide channel using a high power laser and that works too, and at the speed of light.

You can drive quite a high current through whatever your plasma channel strikes. It will blow household electronics, but that’s not hard to do. A more challenging target might be an incoming missile. The skins of those are usually metal and they’re harder to blow holes in than plywood. A metal skin also protects the internal electronics from the current, which is a good job when you think about it. Aircraft are routinely struck by full-scale lightning and it would be a nuisance if that blew even the in-flight movie tech, let alone the control electronics in a typical fly-by-wire plane.

Long story short, directed electrical disharges are useful against individual personnel (think tasers) and might do some harm (like detonating them) to the most primitive of missiles I suppose. But if you’re thinking of letting incoming fire get to within even a quarter of a mile of you, never mind 35ft, then you’d better be a lot braver than I am.

As a lot of people have concluded over the years, if you have a fast electrical pulser you’ll do a lot more damage with it by using it to launch a solid hypersonic projectile. We always end up hurling lumps of stuff at things/people we don’t like. Some of these have a range of a hundred miles, albeit with a much larger cap bank

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