What could explain the gallium anomaly?

Whoops, yeah, made a few mistakes. Next time I'll do the usual and open a throwaway spreadsheet. Also, picking gallium-density from a slightly higher temperature where it's liquid.

> Google is (still) a great tool for this sort of conversion

Alas, not in this case, since Google is interpreting that as a 42-gallon "petrochemical-industry traditional abstract measuring unit of crude oil" as opposed to a 55-gallon "physical container readers may have seen and everybody actually uses." (Including to hold crude oil, in the rare cases that it's not in an enormous tank or pipeline.)

Perhaps this is an example of where "intelligent assistant" software lands in a dangerous middle-zone of "wrong, but not wrong enough that it's obvious."

Anywho, if we reword it a bit and put in a less-rounded density, it comes out the same:

https://www.google.com/search?q=57+tonnes+%2F+%286.095+g%2Fc...

__________

P.S.: The way it parses this small change is also amusing, where "in water barrels" isn't a change in the type of barrel, but instead introduces a non-SI unit of pressure, making everything murky indeed.

https://www.google.com/search?q=57+tonnes+%2F+%286.1+g%2Fcm%...

My preference for this on the web is Wolfram Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=57+tonnes+%2F+%286.1+g%...

(note I've slightly changed the prompt to match the "drums" OP used instead of barrels. This avoids the issue other child mentions of ambiguous units, as it clearly states the volume of drum it's using and gives options for others (e.g. the international 200L instead of the US 208L/55 GAL).

Another option which I wouldn't inherently trust to get the calculation just right, but is good for explaining the process if you can fact-check it is ChatGPT-4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/ead07fff-8d55-4147-a742-6e19b26f1e...

The problem is these joint scientific efforts were and continue to be effective tools to diffuse more dangerous possibilities.

In case you have forgotten Russia is still the 2nd largest nuclear power and their arsenal is enough to eliminate pretty much all life on Earth.

The war in Ukraine is terrible but don't underestimate how much worse things could get. If things do get worse it's back channels like space collaboration/UN/other symbolic things that can keep people talking enough to not end up cleansing the Earth in nuclear fire. Just because those things are ineffective at stopping a proxy war doesn't mean they aren't worth doing.

For the same reason I also agree that China should be welcomed into the international space community. They are flying state of the art rockets and have their own modern space station... you couple that with the fact they too are an increasingly powerful military nation then more collaboration rather than less is the way to go.

I hate the russian regime and what its doing to ukraine too.

Still there is something comforting about putting aside our differences, petty and otherwise, to do science.

After all, its not like the Russian scientists involved personally ordered the invasion.

> I'm generally pragmatic about things

Not nearly pragmatic enough. Of course the war is terrible and of course Russia is to blame. But the world doesn't stop moving and high level co-operation still needs to continue. Russia is still a big, powerful, important country and we can't just cancel everything in a fit of spite.

I mean, even Ukraine, even while it's being brutalized by its neighbor, still maintains high level connections to organize prisoner transfers. There's regular communication between the RUAF and NATO to deconflict and identify each other's assets to avoid misunderstandings and accidents. All of this continues, war or not, because everyone knows the alternative is just that much worse.

It's no different for the scientific cooperation. War or not, everyone knows it is in everyone's best interest for cooperation to continue. The scientific ties long predate the war, and will continue long after everyone has forgotten it, too.

And I'm surprised you then completely contradict your moral point - which I disagree with, but it is a point - by suggesting the West engage with China, a prospect against which almost the exact same argument can be made. Of course, taking the "we only co-operate with partners with sparkling moral rectitude" line even further, you could argue that no-one should be co-operating with the USA, with its two disastrous recent wars, either. See where this goes?

This project highlights the complexity of the real world. Not all of russia is evil. So why should the good be isolated, starved, punished? True, people in power can cause irreparable harm to neighboring nations, or even their own (Stalin?) Do we therefore obliterate all contributions of Soviet math, science and engineering and expunge them from our internet?

In the face of injustice caused by politicians and corporations, we must privately support those individuals doing good work.

I see it more simplistically. If there's two guys love neutrinos, neutrinos is they passion, one happens to be born in Russia, one in US (neither one chose to be born there), and they want to work together to understand life, the universe, everything, then so what? What matters more, life, the universe, everything, or some years-long dramatic squabble, years long on the scale of a 5 billion year old planet and millions year old species and perhaps tens of thousands of years old civilization.

The "ideal" of science is that there should be this purity, this honesty, etc. Deviations do occur, politics are common in science itself, data falsification, etc, but we must not let that deny the purity ideal. In the same way, I believe the idea here is to acknowledge that purity over political differences as something transcendent to politics. But yes, such collaborations do have political value in terms of being a "relationship". And yes of course I don't want to poo-poo politics. Whereas it's true that politics is as inescapable to the human condition as say language, perhaps we shouldn't let political constraints guide and dictate scientific work just as we shouldn't let linguistic barriers limit science, both part of the human condition, both miniscule in the face of the work being done.

As far as I can tell the US is fully, and I mean fully, on Israel’a side, even though the genocide now happening in Gaza is a very real thing.

> The fact that 3 years in we are still collaborating with Russia on the ISS and in other scientific programs is deeply disturbing.

Do you think Putin cares about scientific programs enough to stop killing people?

All the "we won't talk to Putin, but will buy Russian gas reexported by another murderer Aliyev" is very nice and emotional, but it did not have any positive effect.

If instead of all of this theater with sanctions, EU and US gave more weapons from the start, and removed regulations to drop oil prices, Ukraine would have won at the end of 2022, and at a much smaller cost than damage to the EU economy already caused by sanctions.

Yes I understand the traditional objections to this idea. I don’t think you’ve quite grasped what I propose tho. Consider this: The reaction v_e + (71)Ga → (71)Ge + e− involves the release of an electron. The local electronic environment, including electron orbitals or metallic bonds in liquid gallium, can influence this electron's energy levels and spatial distribution. These changes can affect the reaction rate and shift the equilibrium position of the reaction, potentially making the forward reaction less favored and accounting for the 20% discrepancy. So, while neutrinos primarily interact via the weak nuclear force, the electron release means the local electronic environment can subtly impact the overall reaction dynamics.

IIRC, there is another quantum number, the chirality. All the neutrinos measured are left chiral. The sterile neutrino, which does not pair with other lepton, is right chiral.

> It might mean 20% more neutrinos exist than we think.

Would it though? It's not like we know neutrino mass from measurement, rather we estimate it from nuclear reactions that have occurred. The estimate would not change if a neutrino oscillates into a sterile one.

> What's the sterile neutrino the partner to?

It would be a very unusual partner that has no concerved quantum numbers, and only mass.

A sterile neutrino would also imply that the neutrino is a Majorana particle (because it would have not quantum numbers that could be "anti").

As a climatologist, I can tell you that we switched to “climate change” because it’s more precise. “Global” in global warming is not the “universal” sense of global, because not everywhere on Earth warms equally, and some places may even cool with mean global warming. Global climate change implies that the averages and ranges are changing. The phenomenon is best measured in statistics.

(Also as a climatologist I have no idea what the handedness of neutrinos even means. Something with spin?)

Thank you. I updated my question with my reasoning.

But I assume that in order for these sterile neutrinos to be dark matter they need to be really slow ...

There is excellent evidence for then-relativistic cosmic neutrinos from the cosmic microwave background acoustic oscillations. As with the CMB, these neutrinos cooled into a "relic" field with the metric expansion.

A cooling gas of relativistic neutrinos becomes non-relativistic when the average neutrino momentum becomes comparable to their rest mass. The present cosmic neutrino background (CNB) temperature is about 1.9 kelvins corresponding to ~ 1.7e-04 eV/c^2 which is smaller than some neutrino masses.

This is still "hot" compared to Cold Dark Matter, and CNB also only a small fraction of the required CDM energy density.

The lightest cosmic neutrino background mass eigenstates could be relativistic at present, so how the CNB is split between (FLRW) radiation and dark matter is ripe for research. It will mostly be "hot" DM because of the heavier, colder species. But not hot enough to leave clusters of galaxies, unlike neutrinos produced by present-day astrophysics (and our own laboratory experiments and nuclear power generation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/cosmic-neutrino-back...

I'd still like to ask a version of the same question, is gallium so special that it only makes sense to do this experiment with gallium?

If sterile neutrinos cause the production of germanium from gallium to be 80% of what we thought it was, will there be other nuclear reactions that we now don't understand? E.g. a given plutonium reaction produces 100g of uranium, currently consistent with the theoretical model, after sterile neutrinos are confirmed will we be saying hang on, this should only produce 80g of uranium with the new model, something else is wrong?

Presumably not, at least with well-understood reactions, so why is gallium so special here?

That's just a myth, you know: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

Fischer made the space pen as a commercial product, all R+D entirely at their own expense. NASA just bought some of the pens from them.

This is a myth, using a pencil in space isn't clever or thrifty, it's a disaster waiting to happen. The graphite from pencils breaks off in small fragments while writing and the fragments can create shorts in electronics and to top it off they're also flammable. None of those are properties you want to bring into a spacecraft.

After Fisher, the pen company, spent their own couple millions to develop a pen that could write in zero gravity, they convinced NASA to use it, and a few years later the Soviets bought 100 of them for their own space program.

NASA was never involved in the development of the space pen, though they supposedly had their own effort that was quickly abandoned as it got expensive. Before that they also used pencils.

The pen is just a better writing implement in space. It cost $3 in the 60s, with wide availability.

If there's enough CO to kill a canary, you still have time to get to safety.

If there's enough nerve gas to kill a rabbit, you still have time to get to safety.

If there's enough radiation to kill a fish, you're a walking dead man... and the 'walking' part is temporary.

I'm no nuclear physicist, but a theory to try out:

1. The leak scenario they're concerned about is an alpha emitter within water, which-- unlike gamma rays and Geiger counters--is harder to detect remotely, since the water serves as effective shielding for anything but microscopic distances.

2. Permanent resident fish serve as a kind of long-term accumulator for dissolved amounts that would otherwise be too hard to detect.

3. The concern isn't so much immediate risks to human health, but rather how any slow leak or discrepancy might compromise the experiment.

> though why not Geiger counters for radiation? there must be a reason.

If a detector fish moves, it works. With Geiger counter, you may not be always able to tell when it malfunctions.

I remember someone creating a sensing system to see if the shells were open or closed. Given enough mussels, the odds of them all closing at once due to random chance instead of pollution drops to zero.