200
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
From a NASA blog post made the day after contact was lost:
The dust storm that is affecting Opportunity has greatly intensified.
The atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover has increased to a record ...
- 12k
163
votes
Accepted
Is the sewage from the Burj Khalifa transported away by trucks?
This story has an inkling of truth, but the specific claim raised in the title of the question is false. The one link in the question that is correct (or at least was correct in 2015) is the link to ...
- 15.4k
94
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
Opportunity does not literally speak English, so no such message was expressed in those terms. However, Opportunity did communicate the information that it had a low battery and it was dark outside.
...
- 1,118
47
votes
Accepted
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
Other answers give good technical answers to what the last message would actually have looked like, but I thought it worth tackling the angle of where the quote came from.
Wikipedia cites an article ...
- 9,012
25
votes
Does this video of collapsing warehouse shelves show a real incident?
I do not know if this video depicts a real incident, but it does show one type of disaster that can happen in a warehouse with overloaded shelves. I don't see any reason to believe it was faked.
The ...
- 12k
21
votes
Accepted
Does talking to a rubber duck improve programmer performance when debugging?
You're not going to find studies that do something like compare the effectiveness of a rubber duck vs a stuffed parrot specifically for programmers working on debugging tasks, nor can we really ...
- 3,879
20
votes
Accepted
Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
"Space" and "visible" are poorly defined, but the broad question has been widely addressed already.
Can you see it from the Moon, with a naked eye?
No:
NASA
"The only thing you can see from the ...
- 145k
16
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
This Metro article cites a tweet by Keri Bean, an engineer who worked on the opportunity mission who had Oppy’s final measurement tattooed on her arm.
This tattoo means more to me than just Oppy. ...
- 300
8
votes
Is the sewage from the Burj Khalifa transported away by trucks?
All statements seem to be true to some extent:
The City did and still does have a sewer system and at least one major plant to treat it
There has been outage at the plant at some point but such ...
- 81
7
votes
Can pressurized air directed on the skin cause an embolism?
To answer your specific questions,
Is it accurate that pressurized air directed on the skin can cause an embolism? ... Are there any documented cases of this having happened?
Yes, there is at least ...
- 7,777
7
votes
Accepted
Would it have been possible for the ancients to have built a Tower of Babel?
Given that it is possible that some building techniques were lost to history, we'll never been able to definitively answer this question, but we can take a look at what we are capable of building now ...
- 2,141
7
votes
Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?
"Next to impossible with the naked eye"
Source:Space in Images
DETAILS
Title Great Wall of China
Released 22/06/2018 11:00 am
Copyright ESA
Description
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst ...
- 1,546
6
votes
Accepted
Is yellow safer than white for center line road markings?
There are problems with that story
To start with a technicality, Alaska and Hawaii did not become states until 1959, so all-states-but-one would have been 47 states in 1955.
Yellow lines were already ...
- 6,129
6
votes
Accepted
Would covering 10% of hydro-power reservoirs with solar panels generate as much power as fossil-fuel plants worldwide?
Technically possible. Do note, though, that getting a solar cell to produce its nameplate capacity is much harder than doing the same with a fossil fuel generator.
The specific claim ("nearly 4,...
- 1,579
6
votes
Accepted
Is a proposal to build an artificial mountain being seriously considered?
Not currently
Its domain (www.diebergkomter.nl) is currently for sale, a strong indication the initiative has run out of steam. But that doesn't mean it was never considered.
Not officially
It has ...
- 3,359
6
votes
Will the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah be the 'longest bridge' in the world?
It depends on exactly what the claim is, but it's certainly not the "longest bridge in the world".
Wikipedia's list of longest bridges, lists Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge as the Guinness Records ...
- 7,144
6
votes
Did big projects used to get finished on time and on budget?
National monument of Scotland
This is not a new phenomenon and there is standing to this day a quarter built monument on Calton hill in Edinburgh that is testament to this fact. It is the National ...
- 2,812
5
votes
Is this video a serious explanation of missile guidance algorithms?
Is this a joke?
Most assuredly yes.
Is this accurate?
Yes, just deliberately convoluted and tongue in cheek.
The BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) uses a combination of an inertial ...
- 22.7k
4
votes
Would it have been possible for the ancients to have built a Tower of Babel?
The 52.5 km tower is definitely impossible no matter what technology you have. The reasons are the same as discussed for the height of a mountain in this skeptics.se answer. Above a certain height, ...
- 1,171
3
votes
Accepted
Do electric cars emit half the CO2 as diesel from a life-cycle perspective?
Summary: I found numbers from University of Cologne (2010) which together with production-related emission numbers spread out over a number of German newspaper articles are in agreement with the claim....
- 3,556
1
vote
Is this video a serious explanation of missile guidance algorithms?
The text there deviates somewhat from the video, and it ends with "Simple.", which seems to imply to me that it's a joke.
That's how guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) experts talk ...
- 15.4k
1
vote
Can you harvest energy from radio transmissions?
In addition to the other answers, it is the principle by which a crystal radio set (first used by Bose in the 1890's, but not patented until the early 20th centuary) works. This just consists of
an ...
- 171
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible