That is not a paint you can just buy in a consumer sized can and use like any other paint though. There are several vendors of coatings that are much darker than this, but they require sending your parts to them for coating (or a licensed process that only works for large scale production), are quite expensive, and can have quite a few constraints on what surfaces and shapes get coated. Some coatings, like vantablack, depend on the surface texture/geometry, so they are quite fragile too.

That said, there are off the shelf paints already that push 98% absorption, so I don't know if this is that much darker than what is on the market. There are plenty of applications where paints aren't so good too, as it depends on the chemicals used in the binders and things like temperature range, mechanical strength, how much power it can absorb, etc. At my job I am often stuck using just graphite for as an optically black material, which isn't that dark but meets all of the other requirements.

I always thought valuing knowledge and discovery, even when not immediately practical, was one of the ways to take a stand against capitalism, or at least economic materialism.

It is surprising how much the off brands vary for these things. Texture is anywhere from wet cardboard to effervescent to masonry. Flavor varies anywhere from antacid to chemical burn strength artificial fruit.

School calendars in Florida had hurricane make up days listed at the end of the year, just like snow make up days I've only heard about in other places...

At least in my area of the PNW, we have plenty of snow removal equipment and the cities are mostly pretty good about preparing beforehand as much as possible. As long as it doesn't come down too fast, they can get things clear in the night or early morning. That said, they chose not to get winter tires for city buses, so they struggle with any hills in slippery conditions, and an actual storm will still dump snow faster than they can clear.

Also, while somewhat true of the PNW, I found ice to be much worse on parts of the east coast. Several times while living there, I would hear people make jokes about schools closing with less than an inch of snow, but there was nearly half an inch of ice under the snow from the freezing rain before it started to snow. Even many places in the deep blue on that map would shut down with bad ice.

I've ran out to street parking and rummaged through my car trunk with just shorts in -30/-35 weather, but there was sun and no wind. Wind can make a huge difference, as can standing around vs. walking. I can stand around at a slightly sheltered bus stop for half an hour in that weather, or walk for 30-60 minutes easily, but I simply don't have adequate clothing for hours in such weather.

I've known several people that worked a stint on projects at the South Pole. Even though the temperatures were "only" -20 something in the summer, they were explicitly told not to bring a coat on their first trip as they would be issued an appropriate one. The project really did not want to risk someone underestimating how difficult it would be standing outside in windy conditions doing non-physically intense activity.

The two writer/directors are Canadian and it was produced by a company out of Montreal that is described as specializing in First Nations productions. A summary lists at least two Canadian musicians: Buffy Sainte-Marie and Robbie Robertson.

Unfortunately the PBS stream doesn't work in Canada.

I've known people who had medical conditions catch up to them at any age from teens to 70s, although it definitely gets worse with age. I also know many coworkers well into their 70s, and a few into the 80s, doing the exact same work they did decades ago with way more than enough money than they would need to retire at any point. I've seen friends and relatives start to go senile from 50s-70s, while I have and had relatives be active physically and mentally into their 90s, happily helping the family.

A lot of people reach the point that feels like they lived too long, although it is rather difficult to predict when that will come, especially as some quality of life improvements are being made in medicine. Although if you reach that point in your 30s and don't have an obvious physical condition making you tired all the time, it could be more of along the lines of lifestyle and/or depression (or some common but less obvious physical issues) instead of age. That stuff can change, while getting older can't.

Maintaining acceleration for a long enough time to travel galactic distances would be impractical as far as we currently know, as the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is quite harsh.

If you accelerated at 1g for about 3.5 years of ship time, that would be enough to get to Alpha Centauri, including coming to a stop there. Alternatively, if you didn't try stopping and accelerated in the same direction for 3.5 years, you could reach 96% of c. At 96% c though, distances to destinations would shrink only by about 70% in the ship's frame compared to measurements on Earth. So in a 80 year human lifetime within the ship's time coasting at 96% c, you would get about ~270 light years (as originally measured from Earth).

Now to maintain that 1 g for 3.5 years, assuming you had an ideal rocket with an exhaust velocity of c, the rocket equation tells you your ship needs to start as 97% fuel by mass, and only allows 3% of the mass to go toward engine, fuel containment, and payload (all of which needs to be strong enough to hold up to 1g, i.e. built like a building and storage vessel on Earth, not paper thin). The rocket equation is exponential, so any variation from this can get even worse with small changes. For example, an antimatter rocket with generously estimated exhaust velocity of c/3, would drop your nonfuel fraction for a 3.5 year trip from 3% down to 0.002% of your total ship starting mass. A longer acceleration is likewise bad, so like say 20 years, which would get you to the center of the galaxy at constant 1 g, requires your starting ship to only be one part per billion not-fuel.

The only way to get away from the rocket equation is to not carry your fuel. However something like a laser propelled light sail would become extremely difficult over light years of distance or at relativistic speeds. And fuel collection en route like the Bussard ramjet idea tends to have speed limits way below relativistic speeds due to drag from the collected fuel.

For now, it seems really hard scifi would be limited to generational ships for travel to the stars.

(All numbers in this post should be relativistic if I did things correctly...)

Controlled burns can be effective at managing forest fires where the scale makes water and foam impractical. Although sometimes the fire gets out of hand, and there is always of a question of whether those cases were more or less damaging than an eventual fire without management.

Last I heard, which seems to be similar to what is in an older article linked in the Futurism article, they are targeting low Earth orbit and will use a fleet of cubesats. This will allow a large display of dots, and could possibly be quite cheap to launch if they find another launch to piggy-back on with enough room. If using reflected sunlight, they don't need much power or weight, just a flat shiny surface. The first gen Irridium satellites were noted for being very bright when reflecting sunlight off a panel that is only a couple square meters.

I don't think it would be difficult to make a cubesat (or smaller) with a deployed mylar or kapton reflector, and most of the mass being used for fuel and engine for station keeping. It would probably be a question of just finding an appropriate launch to get enough spare room, and to find someone to pay for an ad that is only visible for a few minutes each night. Cubesats can cost as low as $10k each to launch.

It can be a tricky balancing act as the amount of tap water consumed and exposure to other fluoride products varies a lot (especially with bottled water's popularity and its unknown amount of fluoride). For some effects, the same dosage may affect kids different than adults. Some of the suspect problems from excess fluorine exposer are from compounding of other problems (e.g. affecting absorption of heavy metals). The usage of tap water and these compound problems can also correlate heavily with demographics too.

That said, it seems there is a lot of evidence that recommended dosage is quite a ways from problematic dosage, other than some possible cosmetic effects. The one acute case I remember of people getting sick and someone dying involved over hundred times the recommended dosage. Research about chronic exposure is a bit more difficult though.

I do think the timeline makes it unethical. And if human space flight ends up being boring and uncommon compared to scifi, there wouldn't be much medical need for such research (unless by some miracle it turns out to be way less risky than childbirth on ground or teaches us something important about childbirth in general). But the vehicle risks of human spaceflight are within an order of magnitude of risks being discussed in elective c-section debates now, and it wouldn't be surprising if those risks decrease in the future. I would bet, a rather small amount, that this would happen within the lifetime of some of the posters here.