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World first UK prototype could pave the way for constant energy all the time - from space | Science & Tech News
  • To complete that good answer, satellites in GEO will experience eclipses 2x21 days per year (around March and September). The eclipse duration during these periods will vary from 0 to 70minutes and then down to 0 again, with one eclipse per day, around midnight.

    So your solar plant in space will work 100% of the time 320+ days a year, and will have a small down time that can be up to an hour in the middle of the night otherwise. Not perfect but actually very manageable with a little bit of storage on the ground.

    Overall, the main concern with these systems is the total cost, including launch cost. It is hard to tell if it will be competitive with solar + battery on the ground.

  • Do bike tires increase pressure in summer?
  • To do the math, an assuming constant volume, a 30C increase corresponds to around 10% increase in pressure. That's well within the margins of the tyre even if you go to the max rated.

    If you then consider deformation and most importantly leakage over several weeks, this is a non-issue.

  • Recommendations for lightweight wiki servers?
  • I have been using Bookstack, I like it though it is missing a few features I would love:

    • you cannot insert a video in it
    • there is no possibility to comment on a particular text
    • the permissions management is only done with roles. That's fine generally but I wanted to be able to share a specific page with a specific user, and for that I had to basically create a dedicated role for this use.
  • British nuclear sub missile launch fails as Trident dramatically misfires and ‘plops’ into ocean just yards away
  • You cannot really hide it. The launch has to be public to warn airplanes and ships so they can avoid the area. And once the launch is public, such a failure is quite evident to anyone who was interested in following it, so you might has well publish the news instead of trying to hide the unhidable.

  • Why do people wear shoes inside the house?
  • I wear slippers inside mostly to protect agains cold floor, coffee tables, and most important of all, Lego bricks on the loose.

    Also another reason to wear shoes inside is when you are constantly going inside and outside. Which means then your floor is dirty.... which means you want to protect your feet from the dirt. That's a vicious cycle but can be one of the reasons.

  • Chickpeas grown in lunar regolith are stressed but reach maturity, shows study
  • I am not familiar with what is required for hydropony, but I would guess it requires more equipment. Plus growing them on Lunar soil means eventually you get some elements from the Lunar soil itself and do not need to have full recycling otherwise, which means you don't have to have a fully closed cycle for this.

    There is still the issue of the closed cycle for air though (which is where Mars is easier than the Moon for medium term colonies).

  • Chickpeas grown in lunar regolith are stressed but reach maturity, shows study
  • It is on the Moon, it knows it can die due to decompression at any moment and we completely screw up it's circadian cycle with 30+ days. Of course it will be anxious, no need to prove it.

  • Chickpeas grown in lunar regolith are stressed but reach maturity, shows study
    phys.org Chickpeas grown in lunar regolith are stressed but reach maturity, shows study

    A recent preprint posted to bioRxiv investigates how chickpeas have been successfully grown in lunar regolith simulants (LRS), marking the first time such a guideline has been established not only for chickpeas, but also for growing food for long-term human space missions.

    Chickpeas grown in lunar regolith are stressed but reach maturity, shows study
    36
    Stricken Japanese Moon mission landed on its nose
  • Let's see if it wakes up once the sun hits the solar panels. Hopefully the thermal conditions do not kill it by then.

  • Meet Helios, a new class of space tug with some real muscle
  • The main difficulty for this kind of tug is finding the market. There is currently only a very limited market for such missions:

    1. If the customer is big enough, then the rocket itself can do the injection. Otherwise, you can try to find another customer on the same orbit
    2. If it is a geo satellite, then it will have electric propulsion and adding a separate stage is hard to justify just by shortened transfer time
    3. If you are planning on reusing the same tug for multiple missions, you are fighting the rocket equation. This thruster here makes it really hard, you need more efficiency.

    The market fit is quite difficult, and this requires high investment. So very hard problem until we have an actual space economy with people on the moon.

  • NSFW
    WWIII will be fought with sticks and drones.
  • He should have used a 2000 y.o. equipment. Romans knew how to defeat drones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retiarius

  • Removed
    United States weighs hike in tariffs on Chinese EVs
  • It means that U.S. automakers find it cheaper to have their vehicles made in China and then import them in the U.S., rather than make them directly in the U.S. in the first place.

    This means that manufacturing in China is so cheap that even with the tariffs, it is more cost effective to go there. If your goal with the tariffs is to level the game, then this should not happen (no one would relocate like that unless there is a massive gain).

  • This haircut
  • Energy bills in Great Britain to rise by 5% from January as cap hits £1,928
  • This.

    I don't mind if they use the average household number in the title or header, that's understandable. But such an article should have the actual values somewhere.

  • It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated
    blog.miguelgrinberg.com It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated

    I was going through the release notes of the new Python 3.12 version the other day, and one item caught my attention in the deprecations section:datetime.datetime’s utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp()…

    It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated
    13
    NASA can’t talk to its Mars robots for two weeks because the sun is in the way
  • Can we? Yes. Should we do it right now? That's debatable.

    The question is how much this would cost vs getting a two weeks offline every 26 months?

    These two weeks do not create any additional requirements (you already have to make sure the probes can survive for a few weeks without comms), science does not fully stops during these two weeks. And it gives an opportunity to do long duration maintenance on the ground segment.

    Frankly, there is little need to spend >$100M for such relays satellites until we actually have a permanent human presence on Mars.

  • Removed Deleted
    *Permanently Deleted*
    Four men charged over theft of £4.8m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace
  • That will be a nice explanation when they arrive in prison.

    • What are you here for?
    • I stole a shitter and got caught...
  • Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium
  • That's interesting, it looks like I may have a bias on that due to my scientific background.

  • Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium
  • I always said salt, of sodium chloride for NaCl. Who is using sodium for table salt? The only time I heard that associated was when saying that table salt is a source of sodium, which is true.

  • Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium
  • Most likely because the news is in English. And why would Natrium be better on an international forum?

    It is Sodium in most Latin languages (despite Natrium being Latin), in Hindi and in Arabic. And Chinese has a different root. Among the 10 most spoken languages (according to Wikipedia), only Russian is using Natrium.

  • Take a meter reading today (1st of July) as the energy price cap is now lower
    www.ofgem.gov.uk Energy price cap explained

    The energy price cap is a limit on the price people pay for their energy.

    Energy price cap explained

    The cap was reduced to 30p/kWh for electricity and 8p/kWh for gas. If you are not on a smart meter, you should submit a new reading as soon as possible to make sure your costs are computed as accurately as possible.

    This is a shameless inspiration from this reddit post.

    0
    ISP not offering port forwarding anymore

    Hello everyone, I would need some advice on my setup.

    I had an ISP with basic DSL 60/20Mbps and I was hosting my services at home with SWAG as a main proxy, opening the ports. I ordered 2 days ago a plan with a new ISP for a 1Gbps line, that offered port forwarding as well. The installation was done today and it turns out they retired the port forwarding on my offer yesterday.

    I can see potentially 3 choices:

    1. stay with the old ISP and the slow-ish line. My main issue was the uplink speed that made off-site backup a pain
    2. go with the new ISP but order the higher speed plan that is £25/month more expensive, and without a proper guarantee that they will keep offering the port forwarding
    3. use the non-port forwarding option, but rent a small VPS that would act as a front-end (through zerotier/tailscale/direct wireguard), paying a small latency cost when accessing remotely.

    I am not fully sure about the pros and cons of the different ways on the last option. I would be kin on keeping my home server fully capable, the point of me self-hosting being to cope with temporary disconnection at home. But then you can either have an IP table routing in the VPS to forward everything on the used port, or have another nginx proxy there to redirect everything. And I am not fully sure VPS providers are generally OK with this kind of use.

    Has anyone got a similar setup to option 3 and would have some advices?

    Edit 1: Thanks a lot for your comments everyone!

    I got a small VPS (not the cheapest one yet) and setup a wireguard tunnel following this principle and it seems to be working so far. I'll monitor a bit the situation as I have 14 days to cancel my plan. I'll also see how it works for gitea running in docker in the NAT and ssh forwarding, I suspect this will be a fun endeavour.

    I decided to avoid using cloudflare tunnel. And I am avoiding using a nginx proxy at the moment as I would need to ensure the certificates are properly synced between the two (or maybe letsencrypt allows you to have two certificates for the same domain?)

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    SpaceX changing Starship stage separation ahead of next launch
    spacenews.com SpaceX changing Starship stage separation ahead of next launch

    SpaceX is changing the approach for separating the two stages of its Starship vehicle to increase payload performance before its next test flight.

    SpaceX changing Starship stage separation ahead of next launch
    0
    /r/france is now dedicated to discussions related to France Gall, a former French singer
    reddit.com r/france

    r/france: La communauté dédiée à la célèbre chanteuse française France Gall.

    r/france

    Some exceptions seems to be accepted as long as it involves Wales and France (Wales being Pays de Galles in French).

    3
    marsokod marsokod @lemmy.world
    Posts 9
    Comments 81