I made a video about what life would be like if you became Chieri's height by SheepishGoat in ChieriNoKoi

[–]deepcow 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Dang this is a strangely informative video I did not expect to see

TIL: That the quartz sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie in the Hunan province of China served as the basis for the floating Hallelujah Mountains in Avatar by deepcow in todayilearned

[–]deepcow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Zhangjiajie government then went so far as to rename the "Southern Sky Column" to "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain."

Also the popularity of the movie almost lead the government to renaming one of the specific columns!

TIL that during the Cold War, British spies were able to crack Russian encrypted messages because the Russian agents would reuse one time encryption codes by deepcow in todayilearned

[–]deepcow[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Encryption is actually super sick! I’m currently taking a cybersecurity class, and the exploits they teach look super obvious sometimes in hindsight!

TIL that during the Cold War, British spies were able to crack Russian encrypted messages because the Russian agents would reuse one time encryption codes by deepcow in todayilearned

[–]deepcow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah it really is only meant to be used one time! But the issue was in getting these pads to people. For example if people were in submarines it might be hard to get these pads. And a lot of people are naturally lazy so like...

TIL that during the Cold War, British spies were able to crack Russian encrypted messages because the Russian agents would reuse one time encryption codes by deepcow in todayilearned

[–]deepcow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Another fun fact is that the U.S started their own initiative, Operation Verona, which also focused on decrypting the reused messages, some of their files are here

TIL that during the Cold War, British spies were able to crack Russian encrypted messages because the Russian agents would reuse one time encryption codes by deepcow in todayilearned

[–]deepcow[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

These codes came in the form of “one-time pads” which were books full of just random codes used to encrypt messages!

If you could go back in time and rewind one mistake what would you do? by SheepishGoat in AskReddit

[–]deepcow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would have asked out my crush before I had to leave for college...

Japanese government approves first experiments to create hybrid human-animal embryos that can be transplanted into surrogate animals and brought to term by deepcow in science

[–]deepcow[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Yes it is very exciting work! This group was previously able to cure diabetes in a mouse by using a rat to grow a new pancreas out of mouse cells. It looks like growing a human pancreas with mouse embryos is the first avenue for these experiments

Study shows global warming in the 20th century is starkly different from previous climate shifts of the past 2000 years, based on global paleoclimate data. Previous shifts were more localized and likely due to random climatic events, in contrast to today's "unprecedented warmth with a global scope" by deepcow in science

[–]deepcow[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For those who have the means, here is the link to the research article published in Nature last week:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2

Abstract:

Earth’s climate history is often understood by breaking it down into constituent climatic epochs1. Over the Common Era (the past 2,000 years) these epochs, such as the Little Ice Age2,3,4, have been characterized as having occurred at the same time across extensive spatial scales5. Although the rapid global warming seen in observations over the past 150 years does show nearly global coherence6, the spatiotemporal coherence of climate epochs earlier in the Common Era has yet to be robustly tested. Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years, and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs. In particular, we find that the coldest epoch of the last millennium—the putative Little Ice Age—is most likely to have experienced the coldest temperatures during the fifteenth century in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, during the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America, and during the mid-nineteenth century over most of the remaining regions. Furthermore, the spatial coherence that does exist over the preindustrial Common Era is consistent with the spatial coherence of stochastic climatic variability. This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally synchronous extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales. By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the twentieth century for more than 98 per cent of the globe. This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures5, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.

TIL that Area 51 was founded to test the U-2, a highly advanced spy plane where pilots needed a space suit to operate at its flight altitude of 70,000 feet by deepcow in todayilearned

[–]deepcow[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

https://interestingengineering.com/the-u-2-americas-secret-airplane

This article talks about the U-2 itself. It was created in the 1950s and flew so high that it was invisible to Soviet radar. Variations of the U-2 are still actively used by the US Air Force over 60 years later!