Americans for the most part are only dimly aware there's an outside world in the first place. The amount of covering up that needs to be done is minimal.
Oh, was it close there too? It was painful when Smith won by 1300 votes.
Yeah, he came out and was a good guy by surprise there.
I really hope he's what the future of the Conservative party looks like federally. Not PP or Danielle Smith.
No, we're not.
Even before this shit started she barely won. The grocery stores have been full of people looking for local products like anywhere else.
For comparison, the F-22's skin had a reputation for scratching from a rough touch and dissolving in spilled jet fuel (or even water). Stealth aircraft from before that were basically allowed to be usually-hangared money pits because they only needed to fly occasionally, to collect intel or end the world or whatever.
The process of designing the things was insane, slow and cost billions and billions of dollars, but that's because the requirements given were over the top. They asked for three planes in one (an Osprey, an F-16 and a B-2), and eventually actually got something like that.
The other guy says they come out about the same as a Gripen, which would be remarkable because the Gripen is designed to be run out of a forest during a Russian invasion of Sweden, and not stealthy at all. Maybe it's more with the engine and air-frame. Either way, it's decent, and they like to brag about how almost all the parts can be reached without disassembly (they're "one-deep").
Lol, I mention it because that's actually what they offered, including a transfer of all the needed intellectual property. Gripens are also kind of neat in that you can run them out of the bush with 5 untrained conscripts as ground crew.
If you mean design our own, sure, maybe in the future. We're as good as the next advanced country when it comes to that kind of thing.
I did say everything else.
Yeah, if there's some payoff coming or starting over is actually just as expensive, sometimes a sunk cost is worth considering.
Why not the Gripen?
There's a strong argument for this. Especially if we don't get a new alliance going with European governments soon.
So the Gripen deal?
especially with the shit build quality these things have for the insane price point they have.
Eh, the cost isn't incomparable to other fighters, and they're way way more maintainable and rugged than older stealth aircraft. It's just that they're pretty tied to America.
18
Heart cockle shells transmit sunlight to photosymbiotic algae using bundled fiber optic cables and condensing lenses - Nature Communications
(www.nature.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/33597552
Summary from the 404 media newsletter
Heart cockles, a group of marine molluscs, contain little communities of algae in their shells as part of a symbiotic relationship; the algae get shelter and protection, and the cockles get algae-processed nutrients.
Now, scientists have discovered that cockle shells have a host of mind-boggling adaptations to keep these algae happy, including windows that offer “the first example of fiber optic cable bundles in a living creature.”
“We show that the fibrous prismatic crystals act like parallel bundles of fiber optic cables in the shell windows, not just transmitting light but projecting high-resolution images through the window,” that have “a resolution of >100 lines/mm,” said researchers led by Dakota McCoy of the University of Chicago.
From the article in the link above:
Fig. 1: Heart cockles (Corculum cardissa and Corculum spp.) are asymmetrical, photosymbiotic bivalves.
Fig. 2: Transparent windows allow heart cockle shells to transmit 11–62% of photosynthetically active radiation (mean = 31%) and significantly screen out UV radiation (mean = 14%, range = 5–28%).
New plant evolution possibility just dropped?
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Months ago I would have said "yes, it's possible". Now, it's become pretty clear LLMs are a dead end. They're trained to simulate the internet and can't do other things with any reliability.
It's still possible with whatever the next approach is to making computers smarter, though. Natural intelligence exists, and we're made out of the same stuff as everything else, so artificial intelligence must also be possible. And, without the limits of recent evolution, it could probably be made far better than us.
Don't forget that pandemics used to be a goofy sci-fi trope, too.