LillyPip

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

The visual artwork for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 has been revealed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Swedish broadcaster (SVT). The visual identity is inspired by the northern lights and sound equalizers.

Slovenian broadcaster RTVSLO has just revealed their artist for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

Raiven will represent Slovenia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

The song that Raiven will sing on the Eurovision stage is titled "Veronika" and will be released on 20 January.

Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS has just revealed their artist for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

Joost Klein will represent the Netherlands at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 after being selected internally from over 600 potential participants.

The song that Joost Klein will sing on the Eurovision stage in Malmö will be released at a later date.

Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, ~~but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen~~ edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen.

Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends, so nitrogen seems pretty important.

It seems weird that our main focus is oxygen when our main air intake is nitrogen. What am I missing?

edit: my climate example was poor and I think misleading. Added a better example instead.

The 21st edition of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast live from Nice, France.

16 countries competed at this year's edition, and once all was said and done Zoé Clauzure from France was declared the winner of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2023 with the song ‘Cœur’.

Zoé Clauzure from France was crowned winner based on voting from national juries in all 16 competing countries. For the seventh time, viewers from around the world could also vote for their favorite songs in two windows: Online voting before the show, where the voting was based on snippets of rehearsals, and online voting during the show, where the viewers could vote during the 15 minutes after the last performance.

[Article continues with embedded video and results table…]

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation.

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

[…]

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole, where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read about closed timelike curves and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

[Article continues…]

This is very strange and I’m sorry for multiple issues in one day, but I just switched to my inbox and it’s all someone else’s account.

I’m @lillypip but my inbox currently shows someone else’s account. I won’t post it here, but I have screenshots if a Voyager Dev wants to see them.

I think I can reply to people from there (the buttons seem to work, but I won’t do it for obvious reasons).

Not sure if this is a Voyager or Lemmy issue, but it’s very seriously weirding me out.

e: it’s not even the same server. My account is on lemmy.ca and my inbox is [email protected] (not the actual account, obviously).

e2: my inbox isn’t that person’s inbox, it’s their outbox. All the content is from them, not to them. I’ve never interacted with this person to my knowledge.

e3: I was wrong: I HAVE interacted with them. A few hours ago, I messaged them to say a link they commented was broken. I didn’t recognise the name until I tried to message them as recommended in the comments here. I can’t message them now; it just hangs.

e4: restarting the app didn’t help, but rebooting my phone fixed it. Maybe it was a caching issue? Like I said, it was showing what was in their public profile (comments and posts), perhaps my inbox was stuck showing that? Anyway, it’s fixed now, so it seems like a caching issue, probably?

I’ve only noticed this in the past few days. Not sure if it’s a new issue, but I feel I wasn’t getting this before last week. (Eta: I’m on the latest update) Most Lemmy image links in comments are doing this now.

Sorry if it’s been posted already; I tried searching and didn’t see anything.

Thank you for all your hard work – I LOVE Voyager! ❤️

Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.

A new story from the New York Times exhaustedly points out that living in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:

In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce.

These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.

Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts need to catheterize themselves.

Link to NYT article (paywalled)