My cat needed to be euthanised last month, and I just received her ashes. They came with a round black sticker. What’s the purpose of this sticker?

They mentioned my chosen urn was suitable for sprinkling cremains (I don’t plan to do that) – maybe it’s related to that?

Thanks.

A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Paper abstract – Robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system:

Abstract
Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry of free space. Analogously, time crystals lift translational invariance in time. Here we demonstrate a robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system of a semiconductor tailored by tuning the material composition. Continuous, time-independent external driving of the sample produces periodic auto-oscillations with a coherence time exceeding hours. Varying the experimental parameters reveals wide ranges in which the time crystal remains stable. At the edges of these ranges, we find chaotic behaviour with a lifted periodicity corresponding to the melting of the crystal. The time crystal state enables fundamental studies of nonlinear interactions and has potential applications as a precise on-chip frequency standard.

Back in Apollo, we had a feature where you could long-press on mobile and save a screenshot with options to include usernames, number and levels of parents, and original post, amongst other things. Those were the ones I used. I also remember there was a checkbox for watermark, which defaulted to on, and which I never touched but always respected, because it never condescended to me.

Anyway, I used that feature so much that there was no Apollo without it before the ensittification.

As a user experience designer, Apollo had done a lot right that the big tech names had been doing wrong, and I’d floundered on Lemmy until the Voyager team started from that foundation.

I appreciate everything this team has done for me, but I do miss this feature. It seemed aimed straight at me, so I almost hate to bring it up, but it was beautiful and I loved it.

(I’m sorry for not saying this on Git, but I just can’t right now)

eta: you guys are the best. I love everything you’ve done. <3

This only works by phone. Be nice, but firm. Don’t be satisfied with their first answer – make them escalate you to the retention department. They’re often authorised to give much larger discounts because it’s cheaper for them to retain customers than to recruit new ones.

Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

….

The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

Article continues…

Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

JTA – A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.

The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

Article continues…

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, ~~but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen~~ edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen.

Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends, so nitrogen seems pretty important.

It seems weird that our main focus is oxygen when our main air intake is nitrogen. What am I missing?

edit: my climate example was poor and I think misleading. Added a better example instead.

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation.

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

[…]

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole, where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read about closed timelike curves and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

[Article continues…]