Further off topic, but this week I have run into several forum posts featured for my search (I'm looking at you, Auto Hot Key) where the moderator responded with a snarky lmgtfy instead of answering the question. That means that I have wasted my time reading down a thread I found searching for a specific issue, and the first few answers I find are people saying to try searching for the answer instead of actually attempting to answer the question.

By the way, guess what ends up the top result when you follow the link?

Why are you like this?

I come here to find out what kind of people share which kind of sources. Is it true that all assholes read scientificamerican?

As a geologist I seco d this, salt is more like a plaster than a rock and super good at sealing itself. You only gotta be lucky that no bigger tectonic stresses build up to huge cracks, as these can't be filled easily, but that is nothing that can't be monitores amd watched for. Ofc it is not 100% safe, see germanys attempt to bury nuclear waste, but it is a damn good option.

Seriously? Idk if you sawbut this is literally the ask scientists community and you are shaming someone for asking a qurstion?????? Also general rule of thump most ppl know how to research on their own and most of the time do so before asking online, specially in online spaces. Plus the link you provided wanted to paywall me??? Idk I really hope that you can learm from this as this was not a good move.

Also easy access to terminals on the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't tthink it's that deep

Real questions like "why does Superman appear to breathe on Earth but not in space?"

😂

I gave up on google a long time ago. I use this to get real questions answered like why is a salt mine better than a warehouse? What in salt makes a mine more suitable? And other questions. I have been told to shorten stuff so I have been. Plus this is an engagement discourse site.

There are some articles out there explaining it better but it basically boils down to salt being an incredibly good seal. It basically seals itself off if small cracks form. That means oil doesn't leak away, and things don't get into the oil. It makes it relatively stable and lower risk than a tank which could easily get a hole or something.

Because it’s run by business majors

Nothing lol about it. https://xkcd.com/1053/

Why?

A word.

To be fair in absolute numbers I believe the US out spends the EU (for now) in education and research combined.

So historically the US government has been a dominant source of funding for basic science. Various government agencies offer grants to scientists to study things that are very “pure science” like the example you gave, to very “applied science” such as ways to use that basic science info to aid national security. The US government funding of basic science grew out of the manhattan project (an example of basic and applied science serving a national security application).

Vannevar Bush, who helped initiate the manhattan project, advocated for a significant role in funding science by the US government after WW2. He’s the reason the US has historically been a titan in scientific research. PhDs from other countries wanted to move to the US because that’s where the best opportunities to continue their research were. This was true even just a few years ago.

The current overhaul and politicization of basic science and the government organizations that fund it has significantly damaged that strength in the US. There have been catastrophic funding cuts in basic science. Many young researchers are looking for jobs in private industry (non research) or moving to other countries. We will suffer the consequences of these cuts for years at a minimum.

The largest "public" scientific institutions in the United States are the national labs. Most famously, Los Alamos, but also INL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Fermilab, NREL, NTL and some others I am forgetting. From my experience, their mission tends to be less aligned with "doing science to benefit people," and more aligned with, "doing science that's too expensive or risky for businesses to do themselves." Or, "doing science for 'national security.'" You see very much the same thing at NASA, where they consult and do science on technologies expressly to benefit the business.

In comparison, the largest scientific institution in Europe is CERN, and is rather equivalent to the US's national labs. Though I have no direct experience with CERN, from what I have seen from their experiments and practices, they tend to do science more for the sake of science compared with the American labs.

Granted, this is a vast oversimplification of the topic, but the point still stands, "the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit."

Imagine you were making a ladder by sticking together a bunch of identical blocks, each of which was half a rung and the attached bit of rail. But imagine the rails aren’t perfectly straight—each one is a little bit skewed, so when you join the two halves of each rung the connected rails skew in opposite directions. When you add the next rung the skew of the rails will continue, but the rotational symmetry of the rung will keep it centered over the previous rung. The net result will be a skewed helix.

It might help to look at the actual structure of the molecule—you can see how the sides of the “ladder” are made of a lumpy sugar bit that has no reason to stack directly on top of itself. Also notice that the halves of the rungs vary in two ways: there are long and short pieces, and there are pieces that connect with two or three connections. These two variables give a total of four possible half-rung types, and each can joint with only one other type (long to short, short to long, two to two, and three to three).

You are asking the right questions. You're even drawing the right conclusions. Keep pushing.

There have been limits on funding science just for science's sake. The oversight has been the peer review process: other scientists reviewing grant requests on merit, reviewing methodologies and findings on merit, checking the math, and building of reputations of researchers among peers. If you do good science, you get more grants. If you do shoddy science, you get called out and you get fewer grants.

Yes there was abuse, yes there was waste, yes there was nepotism, yes there was duplication. This was friction on the system, but the system fundamentally worked. It needed to be adjusted, not shattered.

Now the whole thing is being actively upended, and a veritable politburo is being established to decide what science gets funded. Politics entered the chat. Its chilling research, and we in the US are losing one of the benefits of our society, such as it is.

Back in the 50s scientists were respected and society listened to the smart people. Then came Fox News and the right wing media sphere, which convinced people living in poor, rural areas that they were smarter than the scientists and black people were trying to mooch off them.

It used to! When we were terrified of the Soviet Union and there was some intense competition between our engineers and their engineers. Lockheed and PG&E and Raytheon all wanted university grown STEM folk.

But then the USSR broke up and the US was way ahead of all the rival nations, and the government lost interest.

See also the GOLDEN AGE OF ISLAM.

"fym" means "fuck you mean", essentially saying "what you said is kind of stupid"

Like they said, it's the angle of the nucleotides that create the major and minor groove.

If I give you a million bent rungs and ask you to make a straight ladder, you're going to have a bad time.

And before you ask why are they all bent - you might need to check out the electron configuration of carbon and its tetrahedral structure. Rarely will large things be linear in nature.

What's FYM?