you are the star

(flex)(emo) from Microsoft Teams 3D Fluent emojis.

It so perfectly sums up everything that’s wrong, but also it’s incredibly horrifying

So, basically, someone not very involved in nuclear science but still discussing it posed the question “could we retrofit coal power plants to be nuclear power plants?”. And on the face, this is a fairly good idea actually. Coal and nuclear power both generate electricity the same way (heated water turns to steam which turns a turbine) so you would only need to do some modifications, making new nuclear reactors much cheaper, and killing coal plants.

Well, someone actually involved in the nuclear industry (I think they were a researcher but I might be misremmebering) responded to the question with (paraphrased from memory)

“that’s something many of us have proposed in the past, and unfortunately we can’t do that, because coal plants currently have much higher radiation levels than the EPA allowed a nuclear plant to be operated at. And cleaning up the site would cost more than just building a new plant in an uncontaminated site.”

It’s fucking wild

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.