It's possible. Impacts happen, Soyuz isn't especially well shielded, and Soyuz docks to the "front" of the ISS (the side that faces prograde, into the direction of travel and therefore into the direction where you expect to find high energy stuff to hit)

... Butttt... While the ISS is much better protected and it's entirely plausible that it's not damaged by hits that hurt Soyuz, someone should still notice impact scarring even if the impact has no effect inside the station, and the Soyuz is a small part of the profile of the station - If Soyuz and Progress (same form factor) each take one hit, you'd expect the station to take.... At least five or six, maybe? Just a guess, not a measured statistic... But you see where I'm going with it.

Russian spacecraft getting hit makes sense, only Russian spacecraft and not the station they're attached to is kinda suspicious.

That said, in the interest of perhaps undue (the Ukrainian half of my family would definitely agree it's undue, but that's not how math works) fairness to Russia - Two is not a very large sample. Just because it's unlikely doesn't mean it's out of the question - After all, people have won at roulette before, and likely will continue to.

We'd have to do some orbital mechanics on this one. Most things in the solar system are roughly coplanar on the ecliptic, so the real shape is probably a section of the sphere a few degrees wide.

Or we could probably just guess and multiply the space available by a substantial number, because even that section is going to be pretty tall compared to the Earth. Space is big.

So... God's the Emperor of Mankind, and we secretly live in 40k?

..... Yeah, you know what, that's not the least plausible idea....

The problem is in the interaction. If you imagine the "normal" X chromosome (let's call it N), and the "bad" X chromosome (B), then a network of entirely B cells or entirely N cells works fine, since they're all on a standard "protocol" if you will.

However, if you undergo X inactivation in an individual that has BN genetics (one copy of each), then you get some clusters of cells with each type - And at the interface between B and N you get weird, glitchy behavior that can cause symptoms like seizure because they aren't quite fully compatible with one another.

At least, assuming I understood correctly.

GMO plants are not dangerous to insects unless explicitly made to be.

F1 just means they're first generation hybrids - the children of two "purebred" plants, if you will. If you choose the parents well, you can get fairly low variation - because the parents have known and predictable genetics.

Imagine you're a botanist working for a commercial nursery. One of your company's most popular offerings is a lovely little potted plant. It can either grow a red flower or a white flower, with leaves that are either waxy or fuzzy. The way the genetics work is that red flowers and fuzzy leaves are dominant traits - They win over waxy or white flowers. The powers that be inform you that customers love growing these plants from seed, but they love the uncommon red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants even more! So they want to offer seed packets that grow into red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants - But how can you know what the seed will grow into ahead of time??

Well, you might decide to be clever. You put in lots of effort and careful labor, and you come up with one plant that has, as close as possible, all the white flowering genes squeezed out, along with all the fuzzy leaved ones, and another that's exactly the opposite - No red flowering or waxy genes. When you breed these two plants together you'll tend to get lots of seeds that have both sets of genes, and because of how the genetics work that means almost all the seeds will be red flowered and fuzzy leaved! Maybe an occasional plant will glitch out and have pink flowers or stunted fuzz, but you can offer a pack of ten seeds and say nine of them will grow to flower red and have fuzzy leaves. Those plants are F1 hybrids - If a customer takes them and breeds them together trying to make more seed though, suddenly waxy leaves and white flowers will start appearing out of nowhere, because those genes are still there, just being overridden. You've maintained enough genetic variety for those traits to survive while also creating an entire generation of plants that doesn't have them.

GMO happens when those damned marketing guys butt in, and so management comes and tells you they signed a big contract with Northwestern University and they need you to grow a bunch of plants with purple flowers. "But they don't grow purple flowers, only red and white!" you protest, to no avail - In fact, that just puts dollar signs in their eyes at the thought of being the only ones to offer this plant with purple flowers.

Luckily, this is lucrative enough to them that you get a blank check to make it happen, and you take it to people with the right equipment and skills to do the same thing you did with careful crossbreeding, only more specifically and without the restriction that it has to actually be possible. They take your plant, then they grab a T. ionantha and an African violet, and set to work.

They find the specific sections of each plant's genes that produce purple pigment in flowers, and snip those out. Throw them in a machine, and swiftly they have millions of copies of each gene - And with the power of Science, they edit the genes of your plants and stick the code for purple flowers from each donor into white flowering plants. Turns out, the violet gene works better, so they manufacture a bunch of those, and next thing you know, you're growing these precious plants with aggressively purple flowers that they haven't ever been able to grow before.

Those are GMO flowers. They could also engineer them to produce their own antifungals so they don't rot as easily, or be super fancy and pricey and push the envelope of science forward by editing in the genes from that T. ionantha that code for its method of photosynthesis, so your plants now require less water.

But the edits they make are specific - You get the code for violet pigment, but not anything else from the violet.

I mean, Challenger went down very near the Florida coast, and everyone knew where. It's very easy to find stuff when you know where it is.

Granted, challenger broke up into many pieces, so any individual piece would be in an area, but the point is that's way easier than trying to find "a plane" - If you're referring to MH370 or similar, you're looking in a much less well defined area. The ocean is very big.

And, fireballs and atmospheric breakups are chaotic. Shit happens. A drop of burning fuel here, more air pushing flames away from there. When something breaks up as thoroughly as Challenger did, you'll always find things that have no right being as undamaged as they are, just by statistics - Ridiculously unlikely things are bound to be found once or twice if you look at thousands of examples.

So I don't even know what point you're trying to make, but.... No.

Well, that would fall under "something fucked up and the mission failed"!

NASA gives minimum lifespans, not averages or expectations.

In other words, when NASA says "the rover will last 90 days", they mean "the rover will last no less than 90 days".

Consequently, everything should at least hit that lifespan. If it doesn't, something fucked up and the mission failed. That also means that those 90 days is the time NASA wants the spacecraft to last to consider launching it to have been worthwhile.

Your trust in her, perhaps. You should trust her anyway though - She's your daughter, you probably know her better than anyone and frankly if she's already untrustworthy by the time she's on the internet then you've either majorly screwed her up or you're being awfully bad about not letting her use a computer.

The more important trust, that you need to establish with her during the adolescent years where she's figuring out how the world works and where she fits in it, is her trust in you. That's not something that exists just because of DNA, contrary to many subpar parents expectations - It exists because you show her that she can trust you.

And again - trust is a two way street. The first step to her trusting you is you trusting her.

That's absolutely true, and that's why it's pointless to try to track everything they do. It gives the kid attacker's advantage - You have to stop them from getting through in a thousand ways, they only have to catch you not defending the castle once.

Which leads us to the question of goals. Why is it that this is a war? We already know we're going to lose, so all we achieve is blundering mutual trust.

Is the goal to slow them down from getting to see what they will manage to see anyway? Because by banning it, they'll be very interested in why it's banned, and you may well get it seen even earlier by providing that incentive.

I think the goal should be raising the child to be a well-adjusted, successful adult. Unless things go very wrong, they'll spend most of their lives as adults anyway.

And to that end, I'd argue a foundation of mutual trust, based on a parent and child being willing to approach each other and trust each other with their problems, even the ones that are embarrassing or difficult to talk about.

And therefore, I'd rather teach them how to be responsible and help them learn how to navigate an internet-connected life, than to try to box them up and present myself as an obstacle to get around. Because I believe that will provide a better foundation for a parent-child relationship, and for the development of a child into a person who will outlast me.

Parents probably should be encouraging their kids to feel comfortable telling their parents about their lives - secrets, even, things they don't want everyone to know, because they need advice on something.

Training kids to feel that they can't let any shred of information sit within their parents reach because their parents are boundary-stomping dickwads who think that anything to do with their children is their business and theirs alone, is the exact opposite of that.

Don't prioritize raising children that are obedient and trick you into thinking they do as they're told over raising children to be functional adults. That's the point, isn't it?

The current mail truck fleet is a design that's 40 years old and ended production almost 30 years ago. At this point, the most impressive thing about them is that they still run...

I don't think we should feel bad about retiring a vehicle that old

Human ancestors probably lived in trees a very long time ago, back before even the great apes split off.

Somehow, people take that to mean we went straight from trees to fire and spears and shit sometimes, which is... False.

Ehhhh... Maybe.

Fertility rates among some demographics is dropping pretty quickly, which could easily end a line.

And lines end by chance too - even with an increasing population, an endangered line just needs a few accidents, or a few lesbians, or a few child free daughters, or even just a random generation of sons to come to an end.

Now, most lines that end won't be ancient enough to move mitochondrial eve - since it can only move down if exactly one of her daughters has a surviving female line.

But, the point is that "Mitochondrial Eve" isn't a permanent title, or one specific super important person - it's flexible. Who she is changes with time.

A lot of people overstate the importance of Mitochondrial Eve - not that she isn't important to our development, obviously everyone on earth literally has a part of her in us - but she isn't unique. If you went back in time and shot her, another woman would take her place, and you'd come back to an earth that's probably very different, but probably also is still populated by many humans - And there are probably plenty of humans back then you could have shot and changed history even more.

Indeed, any given woman alive today who has/will have multiple daughters could become mitochondrial eve at some point in the very distant future - It's not impossible, though it's kind of unlikely at this point.

There's no word for her.

But Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent such woman - If her mom had multiple daughters it's entirely possible she used to be Mitochondrial Eve, but no longer is because one of her daughter's female lines was broken.

Eh, probably.

I think the Bible metaphor sucks because it gives the impression that no one else was around or passed on their genes, and that's very not true. It works on the surface level (in a "everyone's ancestors" sense), but it lends itself to being misunderstood and requiring a huge comment to clarify what it means.

I believe the original name was "lucky mother", which... Lost out for obvious reasons.

Ehhh... Doubtful. C-sections weren't all that successful, even for the child, until fairly recently in the scope of human history.

Given that there'd be a very strong evolutionary pressure against needing a risky procedure to live, and you'd need it to be consistent, it's doubtful that that'd survive very long.

She's called Mitochondrial Eve. Her male counterpart is Y-chromosome Adam.

The correct way to read this is, all living women have an unbroken daughter-to-mother line with Mitochondrial Eve, and all living men have an unbroken son-to-father line with Y-chromosome Adam.

That doesn't mean there were no other women or men in their time, nor that none of the others reproduced, nor that none of the other's bloodlines survived - just that all of Mitochondrial Eve's female contemporaries' bloodlines either died out or was solely carried by sons at some point, and a similar deal for Y-chromosome Adam.

They also never met. Actually, if I remember correctly, they lived several hundreds of thousands of years apart.

We also don't know anything about the individuals, and there's nothing special about them - if you went back to the time of Mitochondrial Eve (assuming you could nail it down to a specific generation, which I don't think we have with absolute certainty), and found her tribe somehow, you wouldn't be able to tell her apart from the other women. Actually, who she is changes all the time - If a woman who's carrying the last copy of a mitochondrial branch (imagine Eve has two daughters, and one of their female lines has only one surviving woman) dies daughterless (either doesn't have surviving children or only has sons), then the title of Mitochondrial Eve might move down a generation (if Eve had two daughters and one line dies out, then the daughter who's female lines survive is the new Mitochondrial Eve).

It's more of a statistics thing than anything - it's just if you trace back all the women you must eventually find a common mother. That's Mitochondrial Eve.