The periodic table is not complete, it is just the elements we have found, or made. There is nothing preventing us from adding another row to the table if we make more elements. In fact we have done this twice already which is why there is the strange insert into the table.

The problem is that elements with higher atomic numbers then uranium is not found in nature because they are highly radioactive. Any elements formed in supernova events will have deteriorated by the time it formed into planets. This is as I recall because the optimal number of gluons for the mixture of protons and neutrons is not a whole number and therefore never achievable.

But if you pay attention this does not mean that there is a second area of stable elements further down in the periodic table of elements. In fact there might be stable isotopes of some of the last elements we have made. We have not found any of them on Earth, or by looking elsewhere in the universe. However this does not mean such an element does not exist. It is possible that in the optimal conditions in a supernova some of these elements might be formed. And these might then become part of a globular cluster and form ore vains in planets in these. It is highly unlikely but still theoretically possible.

What is more likely is that we might find planets rich in elements that we desire. It can be as simple as iron, coal, silica or aluminium, but might also be nickel, lithium or chrome. In literature it is not important exactly which element it is so they just call in unobtainium partly as a placeholder and partly as an in-joke.

This have evolved over time. Football players do struggle with life changing injuries in bad tackles. Since it is a game played primarily with ones feet a bad tackle may cause horrible leg injuries, smashed knees, etc. And there is little protective gear that works without hindering the players performance. So in order to reduce injuries there is a very strict no-contact policy that is enforced very harshly. This is to ensure that players pull out of potentially risky situations. The problem with this is that it is very hard for the referee to judge if there were contact or not and how hard the contact was. One of the few things they can look for is how injured the player is. If they are rolling around in pain it was probably some hard contact. But this is of course open to abuse. Players can fake injuries to get other players penalized. This is of course not allowed either but it is hard for the referee to judge these things. And when they need to enforce the no-contact rules in order to prevent injuries they do more often judge in the favor of the seemingly injured player.

People are working on reducing this issue though. It is possible to use camera replays to catch things the referee did not see. This does however take time and either slow down the game or is only available after the situation have been resolved. The cameras might not even catch the incident well, if the match even have a full complement of TV cameras. But it can help to give referees some advance notice for the next match. Or the players might get penalties between matches.

Not necessarily. A summons can be synonymous with an invite although it is often more strongly worded. You can summon someone for tea at which point it would be a bit rude if they decline. So when the foreign office is summoning the Chinese ambassador they tell him the time and place of the meeting and expect him to be there. The content of the meeting or how it is performed is a separate issue. But typically when an ambassador is summoned in this way it is because the government have a few important and urgent questions or statements for the ambassador. Demanding that he stand like a school boy for the duration of the meeting would be an insult and imply that he is subordinate to the British government, which he is not. But you can discuss these things in a more civilized matter like equals, each a diplomat of their own country.

The electrical resistance of various metals varies with temperature. This is how electrical thermometers work and in fact how many heaters are self regulating. For copper the colder it is the less resistance there is. Until you get to a point at extremely cold temperatures where the resistance is zero. So you can send a current through the wire and there is nothing in the wire stopping it. It does still build up a magnetic field which stores the energy and can be used for various other things but you can maintain this magnetic field using very little power.

Of course this is not the entire truth, they do not make the magnets superconducting to save on the power bill. The problem is that any energy that is lost to electrical resistance gets turned into heat. And with the amount of current they need for the huge magnetic fields they need the amount of heat generated by any resistance is enough to melt the copper conductors. The Large Hadron Collider did this during an accident, called the quench incident. It was caused by a bad connector between the magnets which had a tiny bit of resistance. This caused the entire thing to explode in huge ball of green and blue sparks. Green was the vaporized copper and blue was the helium plasma. There are no footage of the fireball but there are images of the aftermath. So best keep those magnets cold and superconducting.

Noise canceling headphones does have limits to what they can cancel out. The speakers and amplifiers in them have a maximum strength and the software and microphones have issues with some sounds. The noise canceling feature might even do some loud sounds worse. The background noise you hear when walking in public is usually low enough not to cause any sort of issues. The sounds which do cause damage to your hearing tends to overload the noise canceling features anyway.

This was kind of the case before. Emperors and kings would sponsor large libraries where research were made public to anyone visiting. And this would attract a lot of scholars to these cities where they would be learning and then even teach others. The purpose of this was to gain cultural influence, technological supremacy and military tactical advantages. I am not just talking about the ancient Greek and the Library at Alexandria here but these programs were also heavily funded by people like Louis XXIV of France, Cathrine the Great of Russia and is how institutions like the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge were founded and operated.

The cost of gaining this knowledge was that you had to travel to the library and even ask for permission to read the research. But this started to change when printing took off and papers could be printed and mailed to whoever wanted it. But this did of course have fees associated with it. Printing was fairly cheap but still cost money and the postal dues also cost some. So you were expected to pay these costs. Eventually as the peer review process were better established and regular journals were published with the best papers the costs of administration were included as well as the printing and mailing. These made sense and you could usually go to the university library of the authors to read the paper for free.

The issue was when computers and the Internet came about. Most of the administrative and practical aspects of running a scientific journal were gone over night. But the fees still remained as they were. There have been much less focus on reducing these fees then there should be. And the owners of these journals knows this and provides excellent service to the libraries that pay these fees to prevent them from arguing over price. It is just considered the cost of research.

There are quite a bit of push towards open access journals, mostly from political and individual academics rather then from the academic institutions themselves. So we are slowly getting there but it is a very slow process.

The rabies vaccine is one of the worst vaccines we have. It have a lot of bad side effects and does not even give protection for long. So a general vaccination against rabies will cause more harm then good. And rabies have an almost 100% fatality rate after the first symptom. So if you are unable to diagnose rabies before the first symptom or at least not start treatment then you are most likely dead.

The good thing is that rabies have almost been exterminated. It is confined to only some outbreaks in the world. And we do use vaccines heavily in these areas, mostly on animals. This means that only a handful of people get rabies a year in the entire world.

I was thinking of adding this but I feel it distracts from the answer. It is not just Bourbon but a number of other drinks which needs to be aged in new barrels. But the barrels can be reused and as you mention is reused for various things. There are indeed recopies for beer, whiskey and other drinks which specifically requires old barrels that have been used for other things. Some of the taste from the original use will be stuck in the wood and come out again for the next batch.

Not only do they not replace the barrels but they can even reuse the barrels even after 30+ years. Firstly they are stored in very dry and dark places. Life needs water to survive, even bacteria and fungi. There are technically water in the content but this is mixed with a lot of alcohol which is lethal in those concentrations. So bacteria, fungi and insects could not survive from it. Secondly wood contain very little nitrites. These are extremely important for all life to build proteins and for the chemical processes in the cell. Especially for bacteria they need a lot of it. But the cells in wood do very little chemical processes and are mostly just structural so they contain a lot of carbon and very little nitrogen. That means that even when fungi or bacteria is able to start attacking the wood it quickly runs out of nitrogen compounds and need a secondary source. This is why wood often rots from the bottom as the fungi can bring nitrites from the soil. But these barrels are stored in stone basements and even then are stored off the floor.

No. It is perfectly legal to carry working chainsaws in the street if you have a legal reason to do so. There is no requirement to dissassemble it for transport or carry it in different parts and so on. That would be unfair to any arborers, construction workers or chainsaw shops. Similarly it is cruel to animals to force them to wear a muzzle preventing them from opening their jaws.

The process you are talking about is called nitrogen fixation. It is done by the nitrogenase enzyme. Plants do not have this enzyme but live in symbiose with bacteria living on the roots and in the soil which does the nitrogen fixation. So there is normally no need for plants to do this themselves.

The problem is that nitrogen fixation takes a lot of energy. Unlike carbon dioxide the dinitrogen in the air require much more energy to break the bonds. So nitrogen fixating bacteria consume a lot of energy, much more then the leaf cells on a plant generate from the sun. These bacteria get their energy mostly from sugars released by the plants through their roots. When the plants lack nitrogen compounds they release their sugar straight into the soil and the nitrogen fixating bacteria use this sugar to make amonia and other nitrogen fertilizers. Nematodes and amoeba will then eat the bacteria and release any excess nitrogen compounds which the plants then absorb through their roots.

However by making nitrogen fertilizers from energy rich natural gas or electricity we are essentially doing the bacterias jobs for them. By adding this nitrogen to the soil the plants are never low on nitrogen and therefore does not release sugar into the soil and the nitrogen fixating bacteria dies out. This of course means that the plants are able to use the sugars themselves to grow faster and larger.

There are of course regional differences due to different laws and customs, even between different states within the US. But in general a temp agency gives the employees a long term job with them but then hire you out for short term jobs to other companies. This is how a temp agency can hook you up with a long term job. It is also quite common for companies to hire some of the temporary workers at the end of their contract. So it can be seen as a sort of a trial period where the company expect most not to be needed afterwards.

The list of jobs you provided is not the typical temp jobs. The demands for these jobs are pretty consistant so it makes a lot more sense to hire someone full time rather then the higher costs of temp workers. Where you do see a lot of temp workers are in phone sales, customer support, modeling business, conferance staff, etc. where the number of people needed can vary extremely based on various events. Where you do see temporary workers in other jobs it is often to replace a worker on temporary leave or in some cases to handle the increased demand around hollidays.

You are indeed right that this is very hard to measure. It is somewhat easier on social media as advertisers often get detailed information about who got shown which ad at what point and how long it stayed on screen, if they moved their mouse over it, etc. Obviously the easiest indicator for an ads effectiveness is to measure how many people clicked the ad and then how many stayed on your webpage navigating around and then how many actually spent money and how much money they spent. But this does not give very accurate results as a lot of people who see an ad will ignore it initially but then talk about the product more frequently after having seen the ad which then might result in a sale through another channel later on. So you need to try to correlate the different ad campaigns with things like mentions, visits to your webpage, and eventually sales. And this can be very hard to do right.

It comes from early days of political debates, before television and radio. The politicians would have to go to the voters and gather in town halls or churches to have debates in person. But due to scheduling there would often only be one politician showing up to these meetings. So they would literally build a dummy out of cheap materials, usually straw, to hold the debate. As you might imagine this was kind of silly with one person making up the arguments for both. That usually meant that the strawmans arguments were arguments that was easy to argue against and often quite silly. Usually just a faint resemblance of what the opposing political party actually meant.

You still hear this done today because it is a very effective rhetorical tool. If you are controlling the medium you can make up any silly argument for your opponent to make your side sound more sane and valid.

It is kind of both. A nuclear reaction does produce a lot of neutron radiation. This will fuse with other atoms and thorugh neutron activation make these into radioactive isotopes. But this only happens during the nuclear reaction and only in the immediate area around the reaction. So even just a few meters away from the center the neutron activation is quite low.

But all this matter, both fission products and neutron activated isotopes, does get spread around the area and with the wind. And they will blend with the natural elements you find in nature and make things radioactive.

When we talk about renewable resources we are talking about resources that we can use, and then after waiting a bit they are still there. They will renew themselves. If we dig up a lump of coal and burn it, then it is not going to somehow renew itself and become new coal. But for example if we chop down a tree from the forest and burn that, then over time a new tree will grow in its place. We just need to make sure not to chop down the entire forest and destroy the ecosystems that support the tree. And no matter how many wind turbines we put up the wind is still going to blow, no matter how much water goes through a hydro power plant there is still more rain filling up the rivers, no matter how many solar panels we build the sun is still going to shine. All of these are energy from renewable resources and can in theory be used indefinitely.

Nuclear is often thrown in with the renewable energy sources even though it is technically not renewable. It is just going to take extremely long time before we have used up all of our uranium resources, and probably thorium as well. When we finally get a commercial fusion power plant it will have even more available resources but still technically not renewable.

A compressed file is a description for the decompression tool as to how to generate the original content. If the decompression tool follows the descriptions in the compressed file step by step it will end up with the exact same data as the compression tool got as input. A zip bomb however is not made by any compression tool. Someone made the "compressed" file by hand creating instructions that would be impossible to follow without consuming infinite amounts of CPU, memory and storage.

You are supposed to use the right wiring with those power supplies. A regular NEMA 5-15 socket is rated for 15A at 125V which gives you 1875W. However if constantly used at maximum current it may still overheat and catch fire. So you should try to fit inn a NEMA 5-20 socket and plug which are rated for higher currents. You could also fit a NEMA 6-15 socket which is rated at 15A at 250V giving you double the wattage. Similarly the European Schuko plug is rated at 16A at 250V.

So basically you can install a computer with a 1600 W power supply if you have the house wiring for it. And it is not out of the range of power usage for domestic appliances. But you should be worried about putting it on a light circuit which are typically lower rated. There is nothing actively limiting the amount of power an appliance can draw from a circuit. This is what the fuse board is for which will cut the power to any circuit where you draw too much current. If you circumvent the fuse the wires and sockets may not be rated for the current that goes through them and they can get hot and eventually catch fire.