r/AskScienceDiscussion

My top three are glass, steam, and electricity.

I'm a middle school teacher working on some history content, and I got to thinking about important turning points in science and technology. I began by thinking about the huge importance that something like glass has had to the development of science. Most people, I dare say, think of technology as big, complicated machines, but think of all the things that glass became absolutely vital for between the 1400's and the 1900s. It coincides nicely with the Scientific Revolution. Steam powered the first Industrial Revolution, and electricity powered the second Industrial Revolution and birthed the computer age.

So I'm just curious what your gut check top three would be?

I have a doubt. I am a masters chem student, thinking of switching to MSE PhD, inclined towards semicon materials, working with engineering profs. Should I switch to MSE given my interests or should I stick to chem, coz when applying to competitive phd programs at abroad unis (especially US) the undergrad or masters MSE guys will be my competition too. Also engg is more physics/math heavy, but had maths and phy as minor for 1yr each in undergrad. Will that be sufficient? Also doing some online courses as self-study related to my research interests (more physics side).

What should I do? Pls suggest.

I've been immersed in the cutting edge of CS because of my field and the direction it's moving, but I'm not an academic. Triaging through research papers can feel overly burdensome, and while a lot of podcasts exist across various topics, I've sometimes wished I could just turn a research paper into a podcast or interrogate it without the risk of hallucination.                                                                                   

I've been playing around with two separate projects that do exactly that. The first surfaces top papers published across various journals and converts them into a podcast-like format you can listen to. The second lets you search topics or papers across journals, select the ones you care about, and literally talk to them without the risk of hallucinations. Hallucinations here take the form of incorrect chunks blended into or cut off from the larger context, not the LLM making things up wholesale like you'd almost certainly get if you just fed the paper into ChatGPT.

I've been seriously considering improving both of these and putting them under one umbrella as a free, publicly accessible service.

You all are academics thus have built processes that im sure dwarf my own so im turning to you all for advice.

Is it worth my time?

does anybody know in which proportion solforic acid, toluene and nitric acid should be mixed to make trinitrotoluene?