There appears to be no investigation...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmed.stanford.edu%2Fnews%2F...
and many others.

There is continuing work in discovering/developing chemicals that promote the creation and development of new neurons. Such new materials help; using your brain is of course essential.

Most scientific discoveries benefit humanity, even if it's discovering "this doesn't work." Most modern scientific discoveries are made by professional scientists. They are making the world better for almost everybody, and they deserve to be rewarded for their accomplishments. They earn their privileges.

The Dark Ages were caused by Christians being more interested in their god than in retaining and advancing scientific and technical knowledge. The consequent human suffering is a matter of historical record. If the incentives (including privileges) to advance science are removed, science will atrophy again and humans will suffer again.

We are not living in a feudal time. By and large, the "class" we end up in is the one we earn. In most places, a fixed "class" (excepting those 0.01% at the top) is a fiction.

It's astonishing and delightful that films on this unstable base are still recoverable. Many old films have been destroyed because they were too dangerous to keep around and too degraded for commercial recovery to be worthwhile.

From your citation, the slightly sweeter Pepsi tastes better with just one sip, but Coke tastes better if a whole can is consumed.

For me, the results are different for diet colas. They all taste terrible, but Tab and Diet Coke are the worst. Diet Pepsi and Diet RC taste about the same and are almost tolerable.

High mileage tires have been available for decades. As always, there are tradeoffs. Lower wear means poorer traction, and probably a harsher ride.

The ability to see flicker at rates faster than the eye's optical response time may be due to saccades. You're sensing a bunch of discrete dots due to the eye's micro-motions.

I use a 42" 4k monitor and it's a delight for computers. More resolution and size might be useful.

For real-life video, more than 4k runs into problems because of the limitations of optics. Except for scenes at infinity focus, or other very flat images, only a small portion of the scene will be in sharp focus and that focus will be difficult for the camera/cinematographer to maintain. Only very good optics even has the capability much beyond 4k. The effort is wasted.

Lead pipe is somewhat of a historical legacy. I think is was used because it was more malleable than other options, more resistant to corrosion than iron pipes, and cheaper than copper. Today the best option for indoor plumbing is probably plastic because of price and some tolerance of freezing, although copper and stainless steel have their places.

The wikipedia page on catalytic converters gives an approximate timeline, and states that lead "poisons" catalytic converters. For many years in the U.S. gas pump nozzles for unleaded gas were (still are?) smaller than leaded gas nozzles, and the car gasoline inlets were sized accordingly. A leaded gasoline pump nozzle couldn't be inserted into a car meant to take only unleaded gas.

The push for unleaded gas was partly due to environmental pressures on lead emissions and partly due to the requirements of cat converters. At the time there was considerable political noise about these issues, particularly in environmental groups and car enthusiast groups.

When the air-gasoline mixture burns normally, the flame front proceeds at a certain rate, and there is no knock. With high enough temperature and pressure, a shock wave is produced and the flame front is on that shock wave: knock. It's the difference between fire and explosion.

Delaying (retarding) the spark allows ignition to occur later than the compression-caused peak temperature and pressure, potentially preventing or reducing the shock wave. That's the physics.

Granted, Diesel engines have no spark plugs and effectively run in a knock condition at all times; that's why they have to be built to be more sturdy.

There are a number of types of fuel injection. Direct injection is used mostly by Diesels; the fuel is squirted into the cylinder long after the intake valve closes. Throttle-body injection and port injection (known by many names) vaporize fuel into the air before the intake valve closes. Stratified charge injection usually utilizes direct injection.

The opposite of selfish is self-destructive.

People must be getting slower. When I was a kid in the 1960s, the time I was taught in driver's ed was 3/4 second.

This paper https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2F26376036%2F suggests 0.5 seconds average, 0.25 seconds minimum.

Much depends upon the driver's state of alertness. If he's aware that he may be in a risky situation, he'll be highly focused, perhaps with his left foot hovering over the brake pedal. If he's just cruising along, listening to the radio and looking at the scenery, he may have to shift his frame of mind and do an evaluation before he even starts to react.

By the word "planet" I assume you mean animals. Damaging the earth can't even be meaningfully defined if by "planet" you mean the main mass of it, which is magma, crust, and water. Similarly, damaging plants has little meaning; plants can't feel pain and their best purpose is to feed animals.

So, we should be interested in animals, with everything else considered only in its role of supporting animals. Since the only reasonable scale of worth is some measure of mental activity, we could just set the cutoff point at humanity and the claim that humans are parasites on what should be valued becomes nothing but gibberish. But that's too easy; let's take a deeper look.

There's no available data on the total mental activity of all species sorted by species. The best that can be done fairly quickly is to say that our standard of value, mental activity, is very roughly correlated with body mass. I don't have data on fishes, so I'm not going to consider them here; I don't have reason to believe fishes do much thinking anyway. I don't think reptiles do much cogitation either, nor do they have much objective value. Global mammal biomass is 36% human, 54% to 57% livestock and 2% to 5% pets depending upon whether horses are pets or livestock, and 5% wild mammals. 95% of mammal mass, and by implication 95% of all earthly mental activity, is either human or depends upon humans for its very existence. Again, what's the parasite here? What's preying on that which should be valued? Humans either support most of what should be valued or are the thing that should be valued.

If not humans and the animals that humans support, what living things do you consider to be of value, and of value to what? Or is it life itself that you oppose?

Also consider that a parasite refers to a living thing which harms another living thing that it lives inside (wikipedia, etc.); so you've got a long way to go to not be spouting nonsense. But that's a side issue; what matters is that you propose destroying nearly everything of value.

To expand on your point, oil companies are in the business of producing oil. Some have done a little work on other forms of energy like solar, but they're not very good at it. Let other companies follow that path. Some have done work on making IC engines more efficient, but again they're not very good at it and companies like Toyota are dedicated to making automobiles more efficient. Oil companies produce oil to fill a genuine human need, let them do it. If they stopped, billions would die.

Oil companies try to make the production and refinement of petroleum products less wasteful; that's how they make money. Sure, some of them screw up and try to take polluting shortcuts, but that's not the trend of the industry.

If human life is to improve, it will take energy, and oil companies produce energy. Don't cook the goose that lays the golden eggs.