Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
phys.org
phys.org
Hall's theories are well outside of the mainstream and I don't know his credentials, if any, and cannot speak to his hypothesis's veracity. I'm not a scientist. Would any actual scientists care to comment?
Here is a video where he explains his theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU706V0bltc
Such a non-chalantly delivered diss. I found the lowering of ground strike lightning during the tornado interesting.
[0] "Correlation between nanosecond X-ray flashes and stick–slip friction in peeling tape" (2008) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07378
> Triboluminescence is a phenomenon in which light is generated when a material is mechanically pulled apart, ripped, scratched, crushed, or rubbed (see tribology). [...] Triboluminescence is often a synonym for fractoluminescence (a term mainly used when referring only to light emitted from fractured crystals). Triboluminescence differs from piezoluminescence in that a piezoluminescent material emits light when deformed, as opposed to broken. These are examples of mechanoluminescence, which is luminescence resulting from any mechanical action on a solid. [...] See also:
> - Earthquake light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light
- re: gold from earthquake-induced piezoelectricity in quartz: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442489
- re: sustainable alternatives to quartz countertops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857929 :
> [...] make recycled paper outdoor waterproof vert ramps, countertops, siding, and flooring; but not yet roofing FWIU?
> - Sonoluminesence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence
The process that causes tape to produce to x-rays when peeled in a vacuum in this example does involve a change of energy states, but not in a way that we'd consider a change in chemical composition.
[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innova...
Adhesion, even due to electrostatic or van Der Waal's forces, doesn't cause an electron to be shared [2].
To switch up the analogy (again, IANAC): as I understand it chemical bonds are like a couples thing; if you invite one you have to invite the other, and if you are interested in replacing a chemical bond with one of the atoms you need to first tear the couple apart. That's because chemical bonds share an electron; to share a particular electron with a new atom you need to stop sharing with the first one. (Sort of. I believe it's a lot more complicated than that, with group marriages and such.)
Adhesion is more like a friendship thing. You might hang out together, but there's no intimiate involvement. The electronic bonds are still available, so each each substance can do its normal chemical reaction thing with other atoms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionic_bonding
[2] Despite my previous cheesy analogy, electrostatic adhesion is the real static-cling force, not van Der Waal's. (But electrostatic adhesion isn't what makes sticky tape sticky, van Der Waals is.) The former is between entire molecules or groups of molecules, one group having a total positive charge compared to the other. van Der Waal's is pin-point attraction between local differences in molecular charge distribution, and each molecule in total might be electrically neutral. For example, a neutral water molecule has two highly-positive areas near the Hydrogen atoms and a highly-negative region away from them.
And what they're saying is the energy of the lightning is acting as a particle accelerator. aka atom smasher. And there's a surprising level of atom smashing going on in the big thunderclouds.
Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.
Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.
I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)
Then how the fuck am I reading this let alone replying?
A small correction: some parts of the new web require JavaScript to render.
That's why on many websites teh experience is better without JS. To be more specific, several paywalled websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is being used to prevent text rendering.
It's especially nice to have JavaScript disabled by default, so I can enable one script at a time until it becomes readable. But not so many scripts that it becomes unreadable again.
I get your sentiment but at some point you have to let go. Many websites die every day not because of obsolescence but because the author eventually stops renewing the domain or paying their hosting provider.
It's just a part of life.
openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp
Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.
This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands.
My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
The actual number (if it's available as a fact) will be printed in the article somewhere, but headings, pull quotes and other call-outs will have some rounded number.
For example, recent article's first paragraph:
"Justice Minister Thembi Simelane took a loan of more than half a million rand from a company that brokered unlawful investments into VBS Mutual Bank by the Polokwane Municipality while she was mayor of the city in 2016. Pauli van Wyk explains what happened."
Further down in the article the "half a million rand" is revealed to be R575,600
That’s not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally state as fact something you know to be false.
Being wrong isn’t lying.
It's also often used to make things seem better or worse than they actually are. "Thousands of dollars" sounds like it's far more than for example $2,108.
https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/24/vulture_central_stand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...
How many 4th graders have any clue what a mega volt is? How many do you think have personal experience with 150 mega volts?
A "stack of AA batteries" as described would be a measure of electrical potential (i.e. voltage), not electric field strength (Volts / unit-length in the applicable dimension(s)).
It's been known for quite some time that high density static electric field "break-downs" generate electromagnetic radiation all throughout the spectrum--look at any wide-band antenna's reception next to any spark-gap generator. It doesn't take much--even the piezoelectric igniter on a grill wand will do it.
One can also generate X-rays by rapidly unrolling Scotch tape. It the same phenomena on a _much_ smaller scale. What's "new" here are the two distinct types of gamma discharges indicating (likely) very different field breakdowns--not that these gamma rays themselves are being produced.
That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me anyway.
American American football fields are all the same size. But American Canadian football fields are all the same, different, size. And American Arena football fields are also all the same, different, size.
I would have gone a different direction by making the voltages and quantities "almost intuitive" - say the electric field is as strong as hundreds of high-voltage substations (500 or so). Laypeople don't have an intuition on substations' physics but they do have an intuition on the economics (tons of homes and businesses depend on that thing) and therefore at least some appreciation for how powerful that voltage is. Likewise we can't visualize hundreds of anything, but we can (sort of) visualize a 20x20 rectangle and appreciate how many 400 is. So I think 400 HV substations is at least vaguely graspable.
So, the journalist are optimizing their writing style For the majority of people to understand and enjoy the writing. That’s probably the best way to write.
Sweden switched to right hand driving in 1967, I don't think if they postponed it till today they would still dare (not bashing swedes in any way, happy to be wrong here). Now that's a brave move, and everybody gained from it. Imagine US switching say to left hand side if whole world would be driving like that... nope.
It doesn't matter if metric (of Celzius based on freakin' H2O states for fucks sake) system is vastly simpler, especially the less intelligent/educated one is (since we have 10 fingers in our face 24/7 and we learn counting on them), ego is too big, thus you guys measure in washing machines, football fields etc. You guys even fail to realize that whole US population would benefit, scientists don't care they will use whatever suits them and they are smart enough to not be slowed down by units used or their conversion.
Nice summary via great Nate Bargatze in this SNL sketch [1]. Its fun to make fun of but its also sad, because it really is pure ego game, nothing more and those are always childish and immature at their core, throttling the potential for greatness in hard to measure ways.
> A strapping newborn baby boy is understood to have set a New Zealand record, weighing in at a whopping 6.85kg (15lb 1oz) - the equivalent of nearly seven 1kg blocks of cheese.
I mean, the kilogram is an SI unit, but uh, I do not know if clarity has been added here.
Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.
TIL carbon nano yarn absorbs electricity, probably from storm clouds too.
What are the volt and charge observations for lightning from large tropical thunderstorms?
(And why is it dangerous to attract arc discharge toward a local attractor? And what sort of supercapacitors and anodes can handle charge from a lightning bolt? Lightning!)
Tardigrades can handle Gamma radiation.
"Researchers create new type of composite material for shielding against neutron and gamma radiation" (2024) https://phys.org/news/2024-05-composite-material-shielding-n... :
"Sm2O3 micron plates/B4C/HDPE composites containing high specific surface area fillers for neutron and gamma-ray complex radiation shielding" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02663...
Electrostatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatics
The Photoelectric effect that supports the Particle-Wave duality > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect :
> Einstein theorized that the energy in each quantum of light was equal to the frequency of light multiplied by a constant, later called the Planck constant. A photon above a threshold frequency has the required energy to eject a single electron, creating the observed effect. This was a step in the development of quantum mechanics. In 1914, Robert A. Millikan's highly accurate measurements of the Planck constant from the photoelectric effect supported Einstein's model, even though a corpuscular theory of light was for Millikan, at the time, "quite unthinkable". [47] Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", [48] and Millikan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 for "his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect".[49]
these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.
https://earthsky.org/earth/definition-what-are-lightning-spr...
Pecos Hank, the best storm chaser on Youtube, has recorded beautiful video of sprites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGPQ5kzJ9Tg
Most of the biodiversity in rainforests is in megafauna and insects, largely because the megaflora are fumigating the shit out of the soil.
If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place to look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity is extremely high -- probably because of intense competition for scarce resources plus boom/bust growth cycles driven by intermittent water and even a high degree of phased ecosystem overlay.
Of course that observation could also be evobiologists who like to go on taxpayer funded hiking junkets
Fierer, Jackson 2006 if you want a citation
> If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place to look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity is extremely high
This sounds a bit like that "you have more bacteria in your gut than you have cells in your body" fun fact. Which may be true in terms of individually countable cells, but in terms of weight it's another story.
In the same sense comparing the genetic diversity of megafauna and insects in one region to those of the bacteria in another is a bit disingenuous imo, because that's comparing two different ecosystem "categories".
IIUC, bacteria tend to leak genetic material between each other. Genes get swapped around a lot, and if some combos don't work out, well, there are uncountably other bacterial cells around. Meanwhile, megafauna and insects have much smaller populations that only swap genes through sexual reproduction, which recombines genes a lot more slowly. It's not a fair comparison.
And until recently, the dogma was that there were more insect species than bacteria species (it could make sense, as insects reproduce sexually so there's more opportunity for genetic drift), but hoo boy were we wrong (we now know from DNA panning experiments, our estimates on bacteria were low because it was mostly only culturable bacteria we were counting).
You're missing my point though: you replied to someone who talked about biodiversity with a remark about genetic diversity (probably without realizing it, which would be a classic case of attribute substitution[0]). Even I know that biodiversity is not limited to genetic diversity, as a quick trip to Wikipedia will confirm[1].
Oh did you want size? Yep. Microorganisms make colonial hyphae which are bigger than any living organism except maybe some colonial trees.
So many of our plants and flowers (here in North America) originate from rainforests and tropical latitudes, but survive at current temps for northern latitudes.
- "Frequency and Spectrum of Mutations Induced by Gamma Rays Revealed by Phenotype Screening and Whole-Genome Re-Sequencing in Arabidopsis thaliana" (2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8775868/ :
> Gamma rays have been widely used as a physical agent for mutation creation in plants, and their mutagenic effect has attracted extensive attention. However, few studies are available on the comprehensive mutation profile at both the large-scale phenotype mutation screening and whole-genome mutation scanning.
- "Bedrock radioactivity influences the rate and spectrum of mutation" (2020) https://elifesciences.org/articles/56830
- "Comparison of mutation spectra induced by gamma-rays and carbon ion beams" (2024) https://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/65/4/491/7701037 :
> These results suggest that carbon ion beams produce complex DNA damage, and gamma-rays are prone to single oxidative base damage, such as 8-oxoguanine. Carbon ion beams can also introduce oxidative base damage, and the damage species is 5-hydroxycytosine. This was consistent with our previous results of DNA damage caused by heavy ion beams. We confirmed the causal DNA damage by mass spectrometry for these mutations.