While there are good uses of permission slips, I also watched them used for political games when I was in school. When the slips were issued by an administrator disagreeing with the teacher, it can be worded harshly enough that many parents will deny it. Ideally a parent would look into it or read the book themselves, but for a variety of reasons that doesn't happen and poorly informed decisions get made. I also had a couple friends that couldn't get permission slips signed for anything, due to parental apathy, not any sort of exercising right to decide one way or another. The administrators would then play games, saying the book or topic isn't appropriate curriculum the following year when some arbitrary number of permission slips didn't come back, even when it was a small minority.

I've heard of a gypsum & polystyrene bead blend being used both as thermal insulation and as a fire retardant building material before. Polystyrene foam by itself, on the other hand, is a big fire hazard.

To see dinosaurs from 100 million years ago, you would need a telescope 100 million light years away. To resolve something ~10 m in size from that distance, it would need to be ~ 5 light years in diameter.

On an unrelated note, the article seems rather slapdash in terms of picking topics that are rather unrelated (cosmology research vs. human space travel), different timing (stuff already built vs. stuff decades or more away), and misleading pictures. For example, just skimming the Wikipedia article on the James Webb Space Telescope would give the reader far more info at various levels of detail, considering the project has much larger scope than just what was described above for the NIRcam detector. The Wikipedia article makes it clearer that the NIRcam (and the telescope as a whole) is good for viewing early galaxies, which is distinct from other space telescopes that measure the cosmic microwave background that comes from a much earlier time in the current understanding of the universe's history.

A lot of fruit pits, including peach pits, cherry pits, and almonds, contain amygdalin, which reacts with water and certain enzymes to form hydrogen cyanide. It is just a matter of how much is there, and for wild almonds it can be dangerous amounts. A genetic mutation causes sweet almonds to lack most of the amygdalin. Sweet almonds, besides tasting different, are also visually a bit different. That combined ease of distinguishing safe ones (tasting better helps) with the easy of growing almonds from seed means almonds may have been one of the first trees to be domesticated in some places, before grafting was discovered.

Still, the user submitted image lists on Cracked can be pretty hit or miss in general.

I wonder how much of that has changed because of phone usage vs. the phones just making it more obvious. At least in the literal case shown in the image, I remember mass transit before phones where many people were buried in a book or newspaper and the younger ones listened to music when the walkman came out and got cheaper. Making eye contact wasn't more or less awkward then than now. I remember attempts to start conversations were awkward more often than not and how often I was surprised people missed what seemed like obvious things like someone in a costume or wildlife. If anything, I felt like the number of people who try to sell you stuff through visual ads or to get something from you by pretending to start a friendly conversation trained many to ignore things and people around them.

Plus I don't think it is reasonable to expect everyone to be sociable at all times, and in a city you don't have as many non-public options for alone time. I'm not sure it was better pretending to be sociable when not. Even before smart phones, I knew quite a few people saying they read or listened to music, specifically because they needed some alone time and wanted it to be more clear.

I don't feel like digging up the specs on the ship beyond the dimensions on Wikipedia, but rounding off estimates in the directions that maximize the amount of tilt (30000 tonnes of mass for the ship, 100 kg for each passenger, metacentric height of 5 m) gives a maximum tilt of ~1.5 degrees if all 3000 crew + passengers were to stand on the very edge of the ship. The actual value would be less since I'm underestimating the ship's mass and and over estimating the mass of people that could pile up on the edge. Also it would be less for the case of trying that with the ship starting level as there is usually a restoring force to ships that resists an increase in the list.

Culturally a large part of Florida is much closer to the North, and while the state succeeded, parts of it remained loyal to the North and caused minor annoyance to the Confederates.

The Earth will be fine, but the thin smear of stuff on its surface is more complicated and had problems with changes in the past. And it is rather difficult to compare the Cretaceous to now, since a lot of changes have happened. E.g oxygen content of the atmosphere was higher then, meaning animals could survive without a diaphragm like modern animals, to the point dinosaurs brought back might not be able to breath.

I can say it didn't work, including testing it on a couple hundred page thesis. It really depends on the person, how they read and write, etc. Sometimes it just comes down to a second person who didn't write the material and doesn't know what it should say.

The ability to pace cars and automatically keep distance from other cars, whether human or machine controlled, is decades old.

More a trust in mathematics and decades old results from both real world and controlled settings.