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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Gene sequencing wasn’t really a thing (at least an affordable thing) until the 2010s, but once it was widely available archaeologists started using it on pretty much anything they could extract a sample from. Suddenly it became possible to track the migrations of groups over time by tracing gene similarities, determine how much intermarrying there must have been within groups, etc. Even with individual sites it has been used to determine when leadership was hereditary vs not, or how wealth was distributed (by looking at residual food dna on teeth). It really has revolutionized the field and cast a lot of old-school theories (often taken for truth) into the dustbin.






  • There is one variant called Magnetized Target Fusion that kinda-sorta works like this, where the “cylinders” are made of liquid Lithium. On each “stroke” of the engine:

    • A rotating chamber of liquid Lithium is spun to make a cylinder of liquid metal
    • 500 pistons situated at the site of each spinning Li pool are precisely synchronized to push the liquid metal inward, turning it into a sphere
    • Fusion fuel (H plasma) is injected into the middle
    • The intense pressure forces the fuel to undergo fusion, pushing the pistons back out and distorting the Lithium back into a cylinder