Cancer

As the person who claims primary responsibility for naming two streets in Austin (Transit Circle and Sidereal Drive) which are awful astronomical equipment puns, not only do I own my puns, I literally put them in concrete.  (Sadly, the two don't intersect; I had no control over that.)

Re: A Thread for Random Mooings
 
Mooing and Laughing in the Rain

The other thing in the news from the last day or two that belongs here is ...
 
"Bubbles" around the black hole at the the center of our Galaxy
 
... experiments in cramming a hundred stars into the black hole and watching what happens.
 
What?!?  You'd do it too, if you could....

Water vapor claimed detection for an 8-earth-mass planet orbiting a M2.5V star
 
Planet's in a 33-day orbit; this is a star from the extended Kepler mission (from which it was a habitable zone candidate) with subsequent observation & analysis from other sources.
 
That link is to the arXiv preprint so it'll be a thick read, but it shows the transit lightcurve as a function of wavelength and the reconstruction of the planet spectrum.

Water found for first time on 'potentially habitable' planet
 

 
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49648746

... especially if the spot is your white shirt front.

This town needs a circle drive named "Loop Garoo".

Nature's pictures of the month
 
"Confused flour beetle", glow-in-the-dark catshark, four years of deforestation in Brazil, others.

This town needs a circle drive named "Loop Garoo".

But which is the sorceress and which is the familiar?

Telling the single-issue telephone pollster that I consider my political stance to be that of bomb-throwing anarchist did, to her credit, get a chuckle out of her.

Not right now, but I heard this last night in the store.
 
 

Hey, there's Mr. Cooper!
 
Lucius Alexander
 
Can the palindromedary tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

"The first rule of Snake Fight Club is you do not talk about Snake Fight Club," comments someone who has been there.

I wanna see 'em do a tesseract.

Proton's radius puzzle looks to be converging on smaller but "Standard Physics" value

The equation of state (the relationship between pressure, density, temperature, etc.) for cold nuclear matter is not known very well.  What particle accelerators give you is data on hot nuclear matter.  ("Cold" means the kinetic energy of the particles is small compared to the mass-energy of the particles; "hot" means the kinetic energy is approaching or exceeding the mass energy.)  Neutron stars are big globs of gravity-confined cold nuclear matter.  Heck, even getting a well-measured diameter and mass for a neutron star would be a big, big win.
 
Knowledge of that EqOfSt is so poor that macroscopic considerations are important constraints.  In the graph of pressure vs density for nuclear matter -- a graph that is really badly known -- you can exclude big swaths on the basis of "unstable" (the pressure would not be high enough to prevent neutron stars and even atomic nuclei from collapsing to zero radius under their own gravity or nuclear binding force), and other big swaths on the basis of "acausal" -- that is, sound waves would travel faster than light, which is impossible.  That core collapse supernovae explode tells you that nuclear matter is really stiff (i.e. it takes enormous pressure to compress nuclear matter), but that's nothing like the details you'd like to know.

Polymerized thiotimolene -- and other chemical substances where some of the interatomic bonds operate through hyperspace -- is another rich source of special materials for starship components.  Producing such things has some strange barriers, however.  Fabrication of specially shaped pieces of such materials requires careful selection of workers, as any sort of latent psionic resonance in the worker shaping the piece can have unpredictable and catastrophic temporal effects, and robotic manipulation of such materials is confounded by imposition of race conditions in the robot computer CPUs, usually resulting in destruction of robot, materials, factory, and (sometimes) planet.
 
Consequently, at this time such starship components have to worked by hand by the stupidest, least imaginative workers in civilization, riveting together generic regularly-shaped pieces under horrifically drab circumstances.  Electromechanical automatons have been tried but they too fail destructively for reasons not yet fully understood.  Steam-driven thermodynamic control mechanisms have shown real promise in avoiding the electropsionic-temporal instabilities limiting other hyperspatial fabrication processes.

Proton's radius puzzle looks to be converging on smaller but "Standard Physics" value

Polymerized thiotimolene -- and other chemical substances where some of the interatomic bonds operate through hyperspace -- is another rich source of special materials for starship components.  Producing such things has some strange barriers, however.  Fabrication of specially shaped pieces of such materials requires careful selection of workers, as any sort of latent psionic resonance in the worker shaping the piece can have unpredictable and catastrophic temporal effects, and robotic manipulation of such materials is confounded by imposition of race conditions in the robot computer CPUs, usually resulting in destruction of robot, materials, factory, and (sometimes) planet.
 
Consequently, at this time such starship components have to worked by hand by the stupidest, least imaginative workers in civilization, riveting together generic regularly-shaped pieces under horrifically drab circumstances.  Electromechanical automatons have been tried but they too fail destructively for reasons not yet fully understood.  Steam-driven thermodynamic control mechanisms have shown real promise in avoiding the electropsionic-temporal instabilities limiting other hyperspatial fabrication processes.

Proton's radius puzzle looks to be converging on smaller but "Standard Physics" value

Arecibo Radio Observatory.

He's gone Flat as a Pancake mainlining on Head East, because there's never been any reason.
 
NT: Terms for pairs of opposing directions in your sci-fi campaign's seven-dimensional universe that don't exist in our four-dimensional one.

A time warp to 1936 has led to all but a handful of competitors being killed by Nationalist artillery fire.