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Its design shines a light on technical skills that researchers didn’t think Neolithic people possessed.

Archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old Neolithic well in eastern Europe, which they believe is the oldest wooden structure in the world.

The square well was built with oak by farmers around 5256 B.C., according to researchers who pinpointed its origin after analyzing the tree rings in the wood, which is the scientific method known as dendrochronology. The well’s age makes it the oldest dendrochronologically dated archaeological wooden construction worldwide, according to the researchers in the Czech Republic.

“The well was only preserved because it had been underwater for centuries. Now we cannot let it dry out, or the well would be destroyed,” Karol Bayer of the University of Pardubice’s Department of Restoration said in a press release.

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O.o.

While eating takeout one day, University of Chicago scientists Bozhi Tian and Yin Fang started thinking about the noodles—specifically, their elasticity. A specialty of Xi’an, Tian’s hometown in China, is wheat noodles stretched by hand until they become chewy—strong and elastic. Why, the two materials scientists wondered, didn’t they get thin and weak instead?

They started experimenting, ordering pounds and pounds of noodles from the restaurant. “They got very suspicious,” Fang said. “I think they thought we wanted to steal their secrets to open a rival restaurant.”

But what they were preparing was a recipe for —that could much more closely mimic biological skin and than existing technology.

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O.o.

This paper describes a new and efficient method of defining an annular region of a curl-free magnetic field with specific physics and coil properties that can be used in stellarator design. Three statements define the importance:

Codes can follow an optimized curl-free initial state to a final full-pressure equilibrium. The large size of the optimization space of stellarators.

Approximately fifty externally-produced distributions of magnetic field, makes success in finding a global optimum largely determined by the starting point.

The design of a stellarator is actually improved when the central region of the plasma has rapid transport with the confinement provided by a surrounding annulus of magnetic surfaces with low transport.

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O.o.

Laser weapons can strike at the speed of light, and they’re quickly deploying to every possible fighting domain, whether on land, in the air, and at sea. But what about under the sea?

Open-source budget documents, the earliest of which date back to 2011, show the Navy’s plans to arm Virginia-class nuclear subs with high-energy laser weapons. It’s a strange idea seeing as laser weapons definitely do not work underwater. Submarines are also quiet recluses by design, rarely popping their heads above water.

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