General science thread

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If you’ve ever heard a bird sing and wondered how you could possibly figure out what type of bird it could be without laboriously searching through recordings, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology now has you covered.

The lab recently upgraded its Merlin smartphone app, designed for both new and experienced birdwatchers. It now features an AI-infused “Sound ID” feature that can capture bird sounds and compare them to crowdsourced samples to figure out just what bird is making that sound. Since the feature launched late last month, it’s become the most popular feature in the app (which also features AI tools to identify birds in photos), and people have used it to identify more than 1 million birds

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At 4:51 p.m. EDT, on Monday, April 2, 2001, the sun unleashed the biggest solar flare ever recorded, as observed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite. The flare was definitely more powerful than the famous solar flare on March 6, 1989, which was related to the disruption of power grids in Canada. This recent explosion from the active region near the sun's northwest limb hurled a coronal mass ejection into space at a whopping speed of roughly 7.2 million kilometers per hour. Luckily, the flare was not aimed directly towards Earth.

Quote: rxwine

If you get word of a big solar flare headed toward Earth (and you still have time left) you can protect your phone by putting it in a faraday cage. In this case, a common microwave. It can't touch any metal, though you may want to put it on a cloth or rubber mat just for extra precaution.

You also need to close the door.

Quote: DRich

How long should I turn it on for?

Quote: rxwine

You just want to warm it up, or cook it? I think it will still not be tenderized.

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Nearly all of the riskiest encounters with Bennu will occur in the late 2100s and early 2200s, with the single likeliest impact coming on the afternoon of September 24, 2182. On that Tuesday, Bennu has about a 1-in-2,700 chance of hitting Earth.