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Preface: this is not a Graham Hancock lost civilisation type of post. This is a the Polynesians' ancestors for around forget than we give them credit for and Aboriginal Australians where never quite isokated as we like to imagine kind of post. So they found pottery shards on an island off the...

What's the typical size of a skeleton crew required to maintain operation and deal with plausible unexpected circumstances without outside intervention, say per GW of output for a limited amount of time? For how long would such a skeleton crew typically be able to maintain operation...

Sometimes, the simplest explanation really is the best... In humans and other mammals, males have significantly lower life expectancy than females. Various prima facie plausible adaptationist explanations could be, and have been, proposed: Males live shorter because of fiercer competition...

Imagine a mainstream supermarket or soft drink producer im Germany, Austria, or France starting to print a "certified to be halal" on products are halal by default, like bottled water chips, tuna or instant coffee. Ie not changing the product in any way, just kind of signaling to potential...

A new study reports on a Miocene ape fossil from what is today Germany. The ape, about the right age to be the common ancestor of great apes (including humans) or a closer relative, shows indications of bipedal posture when waking on the ground, though his predominant mode of locomotion wad...

I stumbled upond this "paper" which appears to be published in a reputable journal, but oh boy is it naive: The human physiological impact of global deoxygenation Basically, they look at just over 20 years of atmoshperic oxygen concentration measurements, find that oxygen content is currently...

There is a recent study that claims Venus may have been habitable until "recently", 700 million years ago. It's long been known that essentially all of Venus's surface is young in astronomical timescales, about that age. The reason appears to be that due to a lack of plate tectonics, pressure...

As the secretary general of the United Nations at the time, a certain Kurt Waldheim was tasked with recording a message to whoever might get hold of the Voyager probes. Here's it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrCaPuQn4_Q Given this, why isn't it a standard trope of SciFi that the aliens...

Get a new puzzle everyday to solve in your favorite programming language (or in a new one you're taking the opportunity to get a first feel for): https://adventofcode.com/2018

What's the cause for quantificational operators operating the way they do on empty lists? Note that I'm asking for the cause, not the reason. If you wish, the implementation. I'm fully aware that any(<empty list>) should return FALSE and all(<empty list>) TRUE, not least because you want to...

Probably better for the humor section, but whatever: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/06/27/monster-asteroid-4-times-than-uk-is-so-close-to-earth-can-see-it-and-heres-how.html?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral

Yes, that's me. Or it might not, depending on how well I sell myself. I have a background in academia in a field that's widely conceived as part of the humanities though in terms of its methodology, it's arguably closer to the sciences than to most of the humanities (linguistics, to be precise...

Any (amateur) astronomers? Alright, I have this pipe dream to one day measure the moon's distance through the diurnal parallax method with my kid as soon as he's old enough to understand the math involved (basic trig, which isn't my strongest suit either so I'd rather wait till someone who does...

I only recently stumbled upon what seems to be a real segment of the "truther" movement, at least on youtube (yeah, don't tell me, youtube): The "Flat Earth Conspiracy". It seems to be a rather recent phenomenon - most or all of the videos are from the last couple of years, and a lot of the...

70 years after Nazi Germany was defeated, when we1* think of how the war was won for the allies, we think of D-day, of British and American fighter pilots, maybe of the desert war and the French resistance, and in this context we might even remember the civilian losses of the Blitz in London and...

I'm not sure this is the right forum, but on the old board our resident transhumanists seemed to mostly hang out in the science section, so there goes, via SMBC :