>A single interrogator can cover some 40 kilometers of fiber, Biondi says, and monitor a virtual sensor every couple of meters.
Earthquake engineer here. This is the cool part. We've got plenty of data to detect and locate any given earthquake occurred. And we have maps that show approximately how hard the soil is under any given site. But the intensity that any building sees is still only known to +-50%, mostly due to variation in the subsurface conditions that we don't have enough resolution to model.
We're not currently able to predict the actual earthquakes at all, only probabilities of likelihood on very large timescales. I could see it being useful to predict future damages to certain buildings/areas based on existing data, assuming an earthquake happened.
I’ve only referred to the train as the metro and the buses as the bus. I’ve only seen in one city the locals refer to the train as the metrorail. And that was Miami.
300 feet is awfully deep. If you believe that 300 feet of draft is needed to get the stability they need, then this seems like the only way to get it. There are no ports, or even semi-protected waters, where you could build, launch, or dock something like that without it running aground.
Some quick research shows that the deepest draft on oil platforms is in the range of 25m (1/4 of the FLIP ship), and further that this ship was built a decade before the development of floating oil platforms.
There is also a lot of more dangerous nuclear material scattered all over the country in bombs and power plants - none of which are designed to last more than a few decades. If society does collapse, and that collapse is not precipitated by total nuclear war, then it seems like the spent fuel won't even be the worst of the nuclear worries out there.
I think nuclear submarines are even more dangerous, since marine environment is much more aggressive than terrestrial one. Thus it will lead to very fast corrosion and reactor's shell corruption. But nobody cares about that.
>Creating them, however, is a monumental task. There are more than four million miles of roads in the United States.
I assume that most passenger-miles are driven on <0.5MM miles of roads, moreso if they are marketing mainly to normal suburb-city commuters. And the advantage of self driving cars isn't really in the last mile. In my commuting days, I would have said
driving myself for 40 minutes <<< self driving car drives for 35 minutes and I drive for 5 < self driving car drives for 40 minutes
Your distance is off by quite a bit (should be ~1e11 m at closest approach).
The actual force is closer to 10^16 N. Which is big, but 10^7 weaker than the earth-sun interaction. But the sun has to move the earth by a couple AU per year whereas Mars has had a couple billion years to move it by the same amount.
Read more carefully - HR8799 is the subject of the animation up top, and the subject of the quote about motion interpolation. Both are credited to J. Wang, while the composite photo of Fomahault B is credited elsewhere. Also note the use of the term 'animation', and that he refers to images taken since 2009 (whereas the Fomahault B images start in 2004).
I shopped for created diamonds a year or two ago, and like others was disappointed with the cost savings. It seems awfully odd that on the spectrum from $0.01/caret to $1,000,000/caret, that created diamonds ended up costing exactly the same as a mined diamond, less maybe 30%. It's clear that there are only a couple players in the clear created diamonds market, and no one is too eager for a price war and to stop printing money. In which case it doesn't sound all that different from the mined diamond market
I have other comments in this thread about cost, but it basically comes down to "they cost a lot more to grow than people think", and the costs after the rough diamond is grown are basically the same as mined diamonds (cutting, grading, etc.). Diamond is the hardest substance on earth, and it costs far more to polish one of those, regardless of origin, than it does to polish an imitation or other gemstone.
In someway I like the fact that diamonds are only valuable to the women who it is bought for and just like a marriage you really can't get a refund. The resale value of diamonds is garbage.
It is a real trend, but doesn't represent 'most' users.