A backup account for !CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org, and formerly /u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • … That’s actually a good point. I’m guessing since the digestive tract is flexible and isn’t held open to the outside all the time, it wouldn’t cause problems with things deep inside. I also think it’s inevitable that if you did shit yourself in it, suction would kick in at some point and make it all a bit more dramatic. And then it would boil-freeze off into space, and be icy cold. That might still be better than pooping a sealed space suit, though.





  • Atmospheric nitrogen is useless to most life, as it’s extremely hard to break down into other nitrogen compounds. Certain bacteria are the exception, and they’re very important both to ecology and human agriculture (although less so since the Haber process was invented and artificial fertilisers became available). The other natural source of nitrogen compounds is lightning strikes.

    Oxygen is completely the opposite. It’s unstable in an Earth-like environment (which is why fires happen), and if you find it in such an environment there must be something special producing it continuously. It’s not the only biomarker astronomers look for, either. There was a planet with insane amounts of a chemical called DMS found recently, and that’s just as eye-catching, if weirder.

    Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends

    You’ve actually got that somewhat backwards. To go really deep you switch to heliox or similar. Nitrox is for intermediate depths where you need less oxygen than in the normal nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, but nitrogen narcosis isn’t an issue yet.


  • No, it’s not worth it. Honestly that’s great all on it’s own. I guess they never had a reason to update it, then, since anybody that needs a more accurate value would just measure it themselves.

    It looks like they went back to the original litre definition a few decades later. I’m not sure why they thought defining volume by mass rather than geometry was better in 1901, anyway. Some fun facts about the kilogram itself, since I never get to talk about this stuff:

    Since 2019 the kilogram has been based on a “Kibble balance”, which is a contraption that precisely measures the force produced by electromagnetism. The necessary electricity is provided by circuit with a material that has quantised resistance near absolute zero, and a superconducting junction which produces oscillation exactly tied to the current flowing through, which is itself timed by atomic clock. This allows you to measure it out using just the new fixed value of Plank’s constant.

    Before 2019 there was just a chunk of metal the was the kilogram, which is hilariously low-tech.