The oldest living tree ever found was a pine named “Prometheus.” It had been alive since before the Egyptian pyramids were built. Some guy cut it down in 1964. Source
he was actually a forestry graduate student who was doing research on bristlecone pines (Pinus langaevea) and got his increment borer stuck in the tree. this tool costs almost $800, so he asked the forest service if he could cut down the tree to recover the tool. after cutting it down, it became apparent that the tree was actually the oldest living organism. ever. (around 8,000 years old). so, not just some asshole. the guy feels extremely guilty and has even broken down in tears during an interview about the accident
OH MY GOD SO LET ME TELL YOU A STORY
So after the grad student cut down the tree and discovered it was the oldest tree in the world he quit studying forestry and went to study salt flats (can’t cut down the oldest trees in the world on salt flats no siree none of that happening) and he was being interviewed about his research, but in the middle of the interview the reporter just stops and says “wait aren’t the guy that…”
And he just takes off running. Literally. Turns around and runs across the salt flats away from the interview and I feel so bad for him but I can’t help but start crying I’m laughing so hard about it imagine a guy high tailing it across salt flats away from a dude with a recorder
For now Bhullar has no plans, or ethical approval, to hatch the snouted
chickens. But he believes they would have been able to survive “just
fine”.
“These weren’t drastic modifications,” says Bhullar. “They are far less
weird than many breeds of chicken developed by chicken hobbyists and
breeders.”
THEN FUCKIN DO IT FUCK THIS “ETHICAL APPROVAL” SHIT COME ON
LET THOSE HUMAN HYBRID MICE DEVELOP TOO COME ON LET’S FUCKIN SEE HOW IT TURNS OUT COWARDS
Some guy just mansplained space to an actual fucking astronaut.
tfw correcting misinformation is written off as mansplaining
tfw when idiots on tumblr who know jack shit about thermo assume the dude is ‘correcting misinformation’ when actually he’s dead ass wrong. ‘Spontaneous’ is a scientific term – it means a reaction with a negative Gibb’s free energy, i.e. a reaction that will occur without an external energy input, i.e. water boiling because of low atmospheric pressure. Spontaneous is absolutely the correct term for what she’s observing, and that is ‘simple thermo’, and this is ‘correcting misinformation’.
This liquid is boiling and freezing simultaneously because it’s reaching its ‘triple point,’ which is the temperature and pressure at which three phases of a substance (gas, liquid, and solid) co-exist in equilibrium. Source
You’ve gone and confused it for fucks sake
Fucked up a perfectly good chemical compound, is what you did. Look at it, it’s got anxiety.
Today is the day of a rather grim anniversary in the history of science: the 1946 death of physicist Louis Slotin in the second death connected to a critical nuclear chain reaction:
Slotin’s procedure was simple. He would lower a half-shell of beryllium, called the tamper, over the core, stopping just before it was snugly seated. The tamper would reflect back the neutrons that were shooting off the plutonium, jump-starting a weak and short-lived nuclear chain reaction, on which the physicists could then gather data. Slotin held the tamper in his left hand. In his right hand, he held a long screwdriver, which he planned to wedge between the two components, keeping them apart. As he began the slow and painstaking process of lowering the tamper, one of his colleagues, Raemer Schreiber, turned away to focus on other work, expecting that the experiment would be uninteresting until several more moments had passed. But suddenly he heard a sound behind him: Slotin’s screwdriver had slipped, and the tamper had dropped fully over the core. When Schreiber turned around, he saw a flash of blue light and felt a wave of heat on his face.
Read the whole story, posted today at the New Yorker. For me, the reckless procedures used in working with this deadly material is just as horrifying as the fates of those who succumbed.
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