I'm an intuitive learner. I learn by constantly asking questions, the answers to which i can then effortlessly remember. By messing around and seeing what happens, and then asking why. Lecturers have been enthusiastic about my approach but said I'm going to struggle because the school system in my country wasn't designed for people who learn like this. I want to kill myself.

The way I see myself learning stuff:

• Here's a fresh store-bought kombucha scoby
• Here's a scoby from the same store that I've been growing for 6 weeks
• If I sequenced the DNA from equivalent cells in each of these scobys, would I find any differences? Why?

The way we are actually expected to learn stuff:

• Listening to a lecturer talk for 12×2 hours, and/or reading the referenced literature. Anything mentioned could be on the test.

I have been trying to do it the mainstream way anyway, but I am getting such bad grades that I've had to re-take a year. Even if I found strategies to help me focus I'd still clearly have a competitive disadvantage to people to whom this approach comes naturally. This feels unfair since I know there is a way that I could learn about my field as effortlessly as other people do listening to these lectures.

How does someone like me succeed in academia instead of just scraping through?

I understand that my prefered methpd which I outlined is what you do at PhD level. I'm afraid that by force-feeding my brain all this information that it currently sees as irrelevant, I will kill my curiousity, which I don't want to do because it's the thing that's allowed me to get this far with practically no effort (I went through the archetypal Smart Kid thing in middle school).

For context, I'm in 1st year bachelor's biochemistry (repeating the year). Although I think that at least in my country, all university courses have the format I described.

Since I am also struggling with ADHD I honestly feel like giving up on Uni and going for some sort of apprentiship-style thing. I would like to have a degree though because it's sort of a requirement nowadays and I am genuinely interested in my subject area. Alternatively, what kind of professions seek my method of inquisitively deep-diving into stuff, as I described?

I am looking for practical ways to prove the Earth is round using materials accessible to the average person. I have zero interest in disproving Flat Earth folks.

I am inspired by Dan Olson's (Folding Ideas) excellent video where he is able to do this measuring the curvature of a lake near his home that has a very specific geography that lends itself to this sort of experiment. I've seen all sorts of ways to prove this measuring shadows and poles, using gyroscopes, etc. and wanted to know if there are any practical guides for proving once and for all that the Earth is round for yourself relying on nothing more than experimentation.

What I'm not looking for:

• Math relying on flight times/charts
• Video/picture evidence
• Deductive proofs built on agreed upon premises
• Expensive tests
• Extremely time consuming projects
• Underwhelming results (relying on a probabilistic argument for a round Earth from the evidence.)

What I am looking for:

• Practical experiments
• Things I could potentially do without spending much money
• Tests that aren't largely comprised of accepting someone else's research
• Potentially math-heavy evidence
• Results that are strong and conclusive

I've thought of finding some easy to test version of Eratosthenes' proof using two poles. I've also thought about using a balloon and sending something to space like what is done in this Tom Scott video. Nothing seems well documented in such a way as for me to be able to follow it at home.

TL;DR: I think it would be a meaningful experience to have the power to prove the Earth is round by myself, for myself. I can only compare this desire to the desire a child with a telescope has when wishing to observe Saturn or Mars themselves for the first time. It's not to prove anything or to settle doubts, but for the personal value of independently observing this astronomical fact oneself.

Greetings Folks, I apologize if this is the wrong spot for this but I'd like to cast a net to see if I can get any additional thoughts or help.

I recently started a new job as NGS Library Prep Tech - sadly I had only begun training on this briefly at my last position but only got an introduction to Speed/Mag Bead clean up. I was hired because the lab is growing quickly and has had issues with organizational stuff in the past and that is my strong suit (my last position I did a lot of clonal DNA / miniprep stuff as far as the wet work went).

The person I was replacing at my new job was only there for two days and didn't really help a whole lot other than hand me a haphazardly written protocol and said "practice by cleaning ladders at different bead concentrations and running them on a gel."

Did that and was told they look good.

Fast forward to using actual samples: There were a set that needed to be redone because the final pool was lost. When I did my first qubit quants after the post PCR speed bead clean up I noticed that the quant concentrations were ~80% less than what they had been previously.

Today I have some remaining sample that I can push through PCR, my plan is to quant 8 out of the 53 samples of the pre / post PCR plate and then again after I do clean up.

As far as clean up goes I had been trying to do the whole plate at once, but I'm going to go back to just completing a column at a time to ensure my timing is better.

Are there particular spots in the Speed / Mag Bead clean up process that I should be aware that I could be washing away / losing DNA?

Do people have any tips on how to be more 'sure footed' in this process?

Ways that I can better practice and say "yup, I've got this!"?

Thanks for the help, and if this should be posted somewhere else please let me know, but as this is 'science' related I thought it fit best here.

I'm by no means a dinosaur expert, but I'd consider myself an enthusiast.

My favorite is the Carnotaurus. It's not quite as big as the classic T-Rex and has even tinier arms, but dude had bull horns on its noggin! And it'll still chase you down and gobble you up.

Everybody's got a favorite. And if you don't, find your poor lost inner child and ask them;

What's your favorite Dinosaur?

Curious if there are movements within the governance or research pertaining to the field that act to promote or suppress certain ideas? Was watching the “Infinity explained in 5 different levels” and thought… maybe there are trends for or against interpretations and/or abstractions that get a rise in people…

Hey everyone,

As a few of you may know, there was a paper released a few days ago claiming that an Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor (RTAPS) was created. You can see the original paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

To bring things into perspective if this holds true we would likely dispense with energy and transportation concerns. It would be akin to the discovery of fire, penicillin or the transistor. A groundbreaking change. See here for a more detailed, bullish list of things it can help with: https://nitter.net/Andercot/status/1685088625187495936

There are many communities that are discussing this. The best summary I was able to find is here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083/page-17

There is still a very much active debate there (and elsewhere online) of people on the viability of the original people. Many are pessimistic that the evidence is scant and that the original publication does not hold its water. An interesting summary of the sentiment of a part of the community can be found through the (faux) betting market of Manifold here: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre

On the link above they are also diligently tracking any replication attempts. Currently we are at the stage were theoretical simulations have validated the possibility of the purported materials to be superconductors (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892).

Finally, a nice replication attempt that tried to make the creation process better and demonstrated some of the effects required to prove superconductivity (scroll up): https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685804254718459904

This is very exciting, because even if some properties are valid, it gives a mjor boost to the whole field.

I used to work with a guy who had three PhD's. (two in Europe, one in the US). He had them in math, chemistry and biology. He said a few fairly outlandish things over the timeframe that I knew him, but every one I ever dug into it turned out was basically accurate.

One of the things he mentioned in passing, but which I haven't been able to confirm to my satisfaction is that when plants reach certain high temps, they start producing H2O2 instead of H2O. (around 45 Celcius)

I've read a few papers that seem to indicate that part at least is true, but I've never found anything that says whether or not this puts plants into the 'consumer' column for oxygen.

Anyone here able to point me to something that has this answer? or anyone here know the answer, even if it's not specifically been published yet?

I'm a big fan of nuclear fusion as a concept and hope to shift toward doing active research in the field at some point.

I'd like to open this discussion to talk about topics regarding nuclear fusion as a future energy source. To start, I'll lost a couple of ongoing fusion efforts I'm familiar with.

ITER:Of course the biggest fusion project is ITER, the massive multinational collaboration which is building a massive tokamak reactor in France. Unfortunately ITER will never produce power for average people, as it's purely a test reactor with no plans to be connected to the grid. The following effort to build a functional grid connected reactor, DEMO, isn't set to be built until at least 2050. This has resulted in a considerable number of private ventures trying iut experimental alternative approaches.

HELION:At the time of writing this, there's quite a bit of buzz surrounding Helion energy, both because of the ambitious timeline theyve recently proposed as well as the investment of Sam Altman of OpenAI fame. Helion uses an FRC topology, which I personally think is a really cool idea. Basically it's a tokamak without the physical shell around it, and is kept sustained by the internal plasma physics. Helion also has another interesting quirk, they are not pursuing the typical DT fuel strategy, but are instead planning to use DD fusion to breed He3 and use DHe3 fusion as the primary energy source. I think this is a good idea because DHe3 fusion is "aneutronic", whereas DT fusion produces high energy neutrons that are somewhat of an unsolved problem to deal with. I wonder though, how they intend to deal with the inevitable tritium pollution that DD fusion creates, and how they will separate that out before Iit creates neutrons anyway.

TRIALPHA:In addition, another major company TriAlpha Energy, also pursued FRCs, hoping to use an alternative proton-boron11 mix to achieve aneutronic operation. I think they've sort of pivoted toward being more a neutron source than working toward breakeven.

HB11: A recent proposed approach is HB11, which is also going for proton-boron fusion. Now with Tri Alpha this seemed really dubious, because hydrogen boron has a much lower cross section for fusion than other options, even the DHe3 that Helion is doing. In addition, boron has way more electrons than hydrogen, so a proton boron plasma has more electrons with causes more bremsstrahlung loss. HB11, however, thinks they can overcome this through high energy laser acceleration. They want to use a high power laser to shoot a fuel pellet into a target. This supposedly will work much better than heating the stuff, because the laser will impart a specific impulse and thus the thermal spectrum of the impact will have a much higher Q factor centered around the cross sectional peak. I'm not really convinced on this, just because I feel like that thermal spectrum would only last for the first few atomic layers of impact before it doesn't really matter amymore.

CFS: The next option I would consider to be one if the most popular fusion startups is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They have what I'd consider the most conservative approach, they are attempting to build a Tokamak design like ITER, but hope to reduce the size considerably by taking advantage of advances in superconductor technology with REBCO tapes.

W7X:The next reactor type I'll mention was in the news a lot a few years back, the Wendelstein-7X in Germany. This is a stellarator design, the crazy twisted car wreck of a thing you may have seen before. The stellarator is shaped that way so that it doesn't require an induced current like the tokamak to have magnetic helicity, because the shape does that automatically.

ZAP:Another well liked dark horse is Zap Energy. They're not as flashy as the other reactors but seem to be working off solid physics that have been proven out over many years. They're trying to do sheared flow z-pinches, which is basically creating a lightning bolt that's perfectly straightened out and super dense.

DPF:One more somewhat obscure option is Eric Lerner's Dense Plasma Focus approach. I'm a little puzzled by this option because it seems to be the exact opposite of Zap, where they make an incredibly twisty lightning bolt instead of a straight one.

FUSOR/POLYWELL:There are a couple reactor types that get mentioned often but are more or less obsolete are the Fusor and the Polywell. A Fusor is a neat device that can be built to fit on a desktop and still produce actual fusion reactions, but has a fundamental design flaw of a physical electrode inside the plasma that introduces too much conductive heat loss. The Polywell is a more advanced concept thay tries to create a "virtual" cathode with orthogonal magnetic mirrors, but I think after many years of experimentation researchers were unable to validate the formation of such a virtual cathode.

NIF:One option that is sort of tangential is the NIF, which you might have heard technically produced more energy than it produced. I dont think its necessarily going to go anywhere, mostly because it's more a weapons program than an energy program, but I think the chirped pulse amplification technology they use is really cool.

GENERAL-FUSION:And finally I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the very highly funded and publicized General Fusion. I definitely give them points for pure childlike wonder. The original pitch was they were going to take a giant swirling tornado of molten metal, fire a ball of plasma into the eye of the storm, then smash the whole thing from all sides with a hundred giant hammers. To be honest is such a wild concept that I don't really know if it really makes any sense or if it's a fever dream. It's undergone a few revisions after finding out that certain parts of its concept just weren't going to work. This doesn't inspire a ton of confidence, but also shows flexibility in their thinking.

There's definitely lots of other companies with other variations, but this gives a general idea of the huge range of ideas and approaches being pursued. I think it's a really cool field to explore and I'd love to hear all your thoughts about it.

So, I have a casual interest, but I find them intriguing. I recently took a trip to Lassen National Park, and saw this boiling mud pool. https://imgur.com/n6dV92U. I am planning a trip next year to Pompeii and Herculaneum. Someday, I am interested in seeing volcanoes in Hawaii and Iceland and maybe more. I casually enjoyed HarryTurtledove's survival novels about Yellowstone erupting, although they are not great literature by any means.

What about you? Any cool experiences with volcanoes or bucket list plans that you would like to share? Do you know fun facts? Do we have any geologists in the room? Take this prompt in any direction you would like.

I enjoy a few weather tools. For example, I enjoy
blitzortung that shows live lightning. Currently, you can see a long chain of lighting through eastern Germany and up through Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is expected, since we’ve had very warm weather for a while, and it’s supposed to change to colder weather soon.

But is there a good website that can show me easily the weather front that is currently creating all those lightning strikes? The sites I know only shows vague colors and you can perhaps implicitly see some change in pressure, wind, temperature etc, but nothing that clearly shows an east front where for example you would expect lightning soon.

I was always familiar with tornadoes living close to or in Oklahoma for a vast majority of my life. However, with the odd weather patterns we’re seeing this year producing severe weather, I’ve gone way down the rabbit hole. Watching weather livestreams, subscribing to chasers, the works. Has anyone else been on the bandwagon?

Ok ok disclaimer, I am a cosmology PhD candidate, don’t have the degree yet. However I do feel comfortable at this point calling myself a cosmologist (I think for the first time ever). In any case, with all the new people here, I think an AMA might be fun. I will try my best to answer all of the questions I get asked, but it may not happen quickly!

A bit about my research. I study the conditions in the early universe, specifically when the cosmic microwave background was forming, and I use CMB data to test our understanding of this era. The CMB formed roughly 300,000 years after the big bang, when the universe was 1/1000th its current size. The patterns that we see in the temperature fluctuations of the CMB can tell us a lot about the universe at this early time, and specifically we can try to use them to see if anything ‘unexpected’ happened at this time, like a hitherto undiscovered particle annihilating into ‘normal’ particles (for example).

Ask me anything about the early universe, or physics writ large, and I will do my best to answer!

I would like to find a good Statistics course to do for myself, and also to recommend to others, down the road ... one that specifically focuses on risk, and the discrepancy between actual statistical probability vs humans' intuitive sense of risk.

I recall a quote, which The Interwebs informs me right now, came from Albert A. Bartlett ... "The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race Is Man’s Inability To Understand the Exponential Function".

Alternately, Mark Twain popularized (but did not originate) the saying "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics".

That's the kind of course I'm looking for, that focuses on questions like how much should we actually worry about supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes, Covid 2.0, WWIII, Trump getting re-elected, etc.

There are two parts to this. One, people often (naturally, human nature, how our brains are wired to handle Risk) obsess about a short list of risks in life that are overblown, or appear to be more of a concern than they actually are.

The other part is, some things have a very small risk of actually happening, but when considered in conjunction with the potential consequences (asteroid strikes, WWIII, global pandemic), are still worthy of aggressive efforts to prevent ... and people often focus on the first element (statistically unlikely) and dismiss or overlook the second piece (devastating consequences).

Anyway, stuff like that ... ideally an actual, hands-on MOOC-type Statistics course, but even a good youtube video or blog article would suffice.

As usual, thanks in advance.

So, I just listened to a This American Life podcast called Ghost in the Machine. In one of the stories, a man decides to calculate, every week, the Average Family Location of his family. By that, he means: once you add everyone's coordinates for every coordinate in which they've been in that period, what city/location represents the average point between them all?

I decided to do the same for my family, which will be much easier because there are no touring musicians among us. The one complication is that a good chunk of the family is on other continents, and I wouldn't want us to "meet" in the middle of the ocean. So some approximation might be warranted.

I'd be happy if someone could provide me the math, I'm fairly confident I would be able to do it with a calculator or maybe put into some crude Python. I don't think I need to make a weekly report, since we're not that mobile. Maybe twice a year, or once every two months.

Thanks!

Edit: I don't know much math

Edit2: holy shit this is not simple at all! Now I feel kinda bad for throwing this problem at you guys. I really thought it would be quick and easy!

So, my 5-year-old nephew is obsessed with huge numbers, especially named numbers such as googol, duodecillion, and centillion. The other day I spent some time reciting these numbers to him, and trying (and failing) to describe them. What I need are some cool facts about these numbers, such as "there are 1 quadrillion cat hairs in the world", or "there are not enough stars in the universe to fill one googol".

Besides math, his main interests are super-heroes and, apparently, cars.

I'm not a math or physics guy, so hopefully you guys can help me cheat :P

I recently began thinking about how plants get their shape and discovered "morphogenesis" after some inept googling. It seems like a fascinating subject so I'd like to learn a bit more. I have some A-level university courses in chemistry and microbiology, but never dug too deep. So I am looking for suggestions on what to read up on in order to gain some understanding of how plants and other organisms get their shape. The ultimate goal is of course to plant my own house.

I'm creating the concept for a story called The Little Differences. It's about an accountant that, one day, out of the blue, notices that a certain calculation is producing a slightly wrong result. Barely noticeable, nothing world-changing,

He runs it on the computer, tries different software, a physical calculator... everything gives a result that's a little off. When he checks on paper himself, he gets the correct result. But, to his surprise, everyone else tells him that he's the one that's off, and that the incorrect result is actually perfectly sound.

I need something that makes sense, mathematically. The weird result must be something that really is wrong, and not just something that programs sometimes get wrong (I don't want it to be explained at all... I mean, the reason why it is occurring must not be something easily reducible to some well-known malfunction). But it must also be minor enough for someone to miss, something that wouldn't really cause much trouble in the real world (is that possible? IDK).

Lastly: it must be something that I'm able to explain (on some level) to a non-math reader.

So, Tildes math wizzes, what you suggest? :D

That's a requirement for a test I'm going to take. I tend to learn better with well designed, reasonably comprehensive books that don't treat me like a dumbass (not as a genius either!).

Please notice that I'm not asking for websites, interactive platforms, videos, or whatever, but about books, preferably ones that I can study on my Kindle (so PDFs are not ideal). I know all the major websites but I just can't follow them.

I can pay very small amounts but I'm pretty much unemployed in a third world country so free is always better.

If there are requirements to understand such books, kindly inform!

I finished school more than 20 years ago and I was not a good student. But I'm kind of a decent learner now that I have a diagnostics (ADHD).

Thanks a bunch!

EDIT: guys, I am actually a beginner in the sense that I literally know little to nothing about the subject! I'm also not a math wizard. Advanced suggestions are appreciated but also entirely useless. This is also for a test, so, beyond a very brief introduction, general understandings on the Neil DeGrasse Tyson level is also of little use for me. I don't need to understand the beauty of the cosmos, I need to pass a test. Thanks!

I'm interested in the subject, but don't know where to begin investigating it. I tried to look over the code for SeDuMi, but it is much more massive than I had realized. I have a background in mathematics, if anyone can point me towards a textbook.

This is something weird to me. I think skin color is pretty diverse no matter where you go, or at least, I don't know enough to say otherwise. But take hair color. Europe has more diversity in hair color than almost anywhere else. Same with eye color. Why is this? Is it just because I interact with more people of European heritage on day to day business, or has Europe actually had more mutations which affect hair color, eye color, etc? Or is it that Europe, being a crossroads has had more people immigrate through it.

If this is racist, it's unintentional, this is just an observation, which I've been unable to find an answer to.

If you have an answer, a link to a paper would be great.

Edit: A point against what I just wrote that I thought of: Asia has both mono and double eyelids, which is something Europe doesn't have. Native americans don't count either for or against, since they immigrated fairly late in a small group, which also explains why almost all native americans are type O

Hi all,

I am a PhD student focusing in cosmology. I wanted to up the science content here on Tildes, and I thought that one way to do so is to have an informal little Q&A session. As such, feel free to use this post to ask any questions you might have about cosmology specifically, and physics in general.

This may not be as exciting as some other science AMAs given that I am a rather early graduate student, so there may be a lot of questions I don't know the answer to. However, I'm willing to try my best and answer over the next few days, and to let you know I don't know if I don't!

A bit about myself: I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago where I studied physics and mathematics, and then I was a student researcher in a computational cosmology group at a national lab. I subsequently enrolled at UC Davis to continue studying cosmology. Ask me anything about physics, cosmology, or high performance computing!

I also invite anyone else with expertise to chime in as well!

Does there exist a function that does not include any trigonometric function in its definition that has similar properties (periodicity, for instance) as trigonometric functions? I can't think of any, and this strikes me as a bit surprising.

Edit: I thought of a simple answer: piecewise functions can achieve this!

It's a dry, windy day. I had my left hand stationary on my cat's back and was petting him with my right hand. I noticed when I removed my right hand from contact with his fur, I got tiny shocks in the middle finger of my left hand, but only when removing my right hand and only in my left middle finger. (He didn't seem to notice any shocks.)

Why is this very specific type of electric shock occurring?

I suck at probability, so I thought I would ask here.

To clarify, given a population of size P, a sample size of K, and an arbitrary number of trials N, how do I compute the probability of having included each member of the population at least once in the experiment?

This problem is difficult to wrap my head around. It seems like it uses a combination of combinatorics and dependent events, which really throws me off.

Edit: This problem isn't the coupon collector's problem (please see some of my responses below). Think of the coupon collector's problem as being a special case of this problem where K = 1. My question is meant to cover an arbitrary K >= 1.

Most spaces flying the flag of science are often unfortunately exclusive in their focus on STEM sciences. In order to combat such a monopoly and until such time as Tildes opens up groups for the social sciences and humanities, I'd like to open this place up to discussion around some of the disciplines which have always personally interested me more than, say, astronomy or biology. Is anyone else here interested in sociology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics..? Has anyone pursued work in those fields? Any interesting perspectives to offer or news of recent breakthroughs in any of those areas? All discussion is welcome.

As for myself, I'm particularly interested in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology--in the latter case, specifically as relates to the Neolithic and Bronze Age Near East. I'll soon be pursuing a degree in anthropology with an archaeological orientation at the University of Buenos Aires and hope to be working in the field soon after the end of my studies. I'm also incidentally interested in sociology, philosophy, and literature studies, but don't have any plans at the moment to pursue academic study thereof. Any questions? Feel free to ask.