The Secret History of Victor Prince Released!

 Yes, I snuck this one out on you.

New York.

 

The city that never sleeps. When a young woman is found murdered, the detective assigned to the case, Judy Eidelman thinks it’s a mugging gone wrong.

 

It isn’t.

 

Instead, it’s a gateway to another world, where a demonic mercenary, Victor Prince, becomes her unexpected ally. Victor, meanwhile, is struggling with his darkest instincts. To him, New York is a ripe cornfield, with souls ready for the harvesting.

 

Neither he nor his infernal bosses have counted on the stubbornness of a Jewish detective from Brooklyn, nor the love of a man who walks in both this world and the spirit world.

 

But can even love and budding friendship save a being that doesn’t want to be saved?'

It should stand alone if you haven't read Lost Guardians but is definitely intended as a prequel.

(And I promise it is not copaganda, trust me).

Available in ebook and paperback.

Buy links:

Amazon

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble

(As usual it will take time to propagate to other vendors. B&N has the paperback but not the ebook at this point).

 

Save The Date For a Show

 One of the things we've seen a lot of lately is some pretty exciting views of spacecraft in action.

And on February 18, we'll get to see something we haven't before. A landing on Mars.

Perseverance is carrying enough audio-visual gear that there will be video footage of the crucial descent and landing. It won't be a live feed because it won't be able to send the footage back until after touchdown.

But we will get to see it, albeit possibly after a few days (it takes time to send high bandwidth stuff that far).

Good Luck Ingenuity

 Perseverance should touch down on February 18, but Perseverance has a lesser-known buddy.

Ingenuity is going to be the first attempt at powered flight on Mars. The tiny craft is a double rotor helicopter (the rotors spin in opposite directions) with a rotor speed of 2,400 rpm. Hopefully this will generate enough lift to get off the ground.

This would then allow for the use of UAVs to explore Mars, increasing our range and helping us map the planet (and better understand its atmosphere).

Plus, it's kind of neat.

The Six Body Problem

 So, this one is kind of fun. TOI-178 has six planets (that we know of), and five of them are in an orbital resonance chain.

Which, by the way, shouldn't be happening, especially as they're all different sizes and compositions. There's a super-Earth hanging out right next to a Neptune-type ice giant.

Oh, and planet 3 is less dense than planets 4 and 5.

Which also shouldn't be happening.

Aliens? Nah...but something strange is going on here. Also making a mental note because something just clicked in my brain.

I Want One...

 ....no I don't, but check out this link for an artist's impression of a hatchling tyrannosaur.

We think they may be the largest thing ever to hatch, at about the size of a border collie...but grew to a 40ft long monstrosity.

Probably the closest thing to a dragon baby we'll ever see. And I want to pet it.

I know that's a bad idea...

The Secret History of Victor Prince Cover Reveal!

 And here it is!

Thanks once more to the amazing Starla Huchton for her work and coming up with an image of Victor that looks more like Victor than my image of Victor.

This is going to be a soft launch, and I don't want to give a date until I have the proof back, given issues with mailing and shipping of late.

But it exists!

Are There Dinosaur Bones on the Moon?

Ah, the latest tabloid science claim; that the Chicxulub Asteroid hit the Earth so hard it threw dinosaur bones to the moon.

This is being run by all kinds of, shall we say, "interesting" news outlets including our old friend the Daily Mail, but I can't find a single reputable source. When Esquire is the "best" outlet.

The actual source of the theory appears to be a 2017 book, The End of the World, written by a science journalist named Peter Brannen using work by a guy named Mario Rebolledo. The argument is that the impact was so huge it, uh, tore a hole in the atmosphere, creating a vacuum, followed by massive winds that...expelled large chunks of the Earth.

Mario Rebolledo appears to actually be Mario Rebolledo-Vieyra, a hydrogeologist who works for the Centro de Investigación Cientifica de Yucatán. So he's from the right part of the world to have opinions on this.

And per ResearchGate, he has written a number of papers on the Chicxulub impact. In fact, he seems to be more than a little obsessed with it. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

He's also written an unpublished paper (in 2019) about moon rocks.

So, this could be a legitimate theory this guy has.

Is it possible?

Impact craters, regardless of size, produce ejecta, that is to say things are thrown out of the crater during the impact and deposited around it. The Chicxulub ejecta, according to one study, launched 70 billion kilograms of rock into space. Some of that rock could have had dinosaurs in or attached to it.

And some of that rock would have hit the moon, and it might have contained dinosaur bones. However, the ejection and the crash into the moon would almost certainly have pulverized them.

Meaning, for once, the tabloids could be right. There could be dinosaur bones on the moon, but we're not going to find an entire t-rex up there.

Just, potentially, material that could be powdered bone.

Thankfully, no "Major Component Failure"

The SLS rocket test was cut short by a "major component failure." Fortunately, as is often the case, this turned out to be a sensor problem.

The other issue with the test was a hydraulic strut going beyond test tolerances (which were stricter than flight to avoid damage to the stand).

The test is likely to be redone in February. 

Venomous Spider Stars?

 It's a great image, but it's the one astronomers use to describe a star that is eating its binary companion. It happens when the two stars get too close together.

And when the star (typically a neutron star) has almost finished the job, of course, we call it a Black Widow.

Ironically, we could use them as beacons for interstellar navigation...

So, About That Fire Test...

 ...it didn't go as planned. The eight-minute test was shut down after one minute due to issues with a thermal blanket.

NASA will now be thoroughly examining the rocket and should be planning a second test for the not too distant future. The test failure may delay the Artemis missions, but test failures are a normal part of the process and at least the problem was discovered now, not later...

Friday Update

 So, not much news here. Things have been pretty quiet.

I hope to have news soon, though. Things are moving forward on The Secret History of Victor Prince.

Sorry to be the boring writer right now. I've had clients wanting a piece of me all week, which is good in the grand scheme of things. Hoping to get some fiction written today.

SLS Hot Fire Test Saturday

 Space freaks - NASA will be doing an SLS hot fire test at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi on Saturday, January 16.

Live coverage will begin on NASA's website at 4:20pm, with the test itself scheduled during the window from 5pm to 7pm.

This is preparation for Artemis I, the uncrewed test mission of the Artemis Program to hopefully return to the Moon in 2024.

And it should be pretty spectacular.

Dire Wolves...

 ...did really exist, outside of D&D and Game of Thrones. The giant predators, up to six feet long, evolved to eat megafauna.

The general assumption has always been that they were, well, wolves that grew in size as their prey did.

Not so!

Dire wolves were pretty dire, but they were not, in fact...wolves.

They were wild dogs, split off from the gray wolf ancestry 5.7 millions ago, that then evolved to, well, look like giant wolves.

They're going to be moved from genus Canis, where wolves and dogs live, to their own genus. And this may also explain why they didn't survive.

Canis is known for its adaptability at many levels. Wolves and coyotes can easily change their ways to survive. And the genetic plasticity that gives us everything from huskies to chihuahuas to spaniels to pugs...

...may not have been present in this other lineage of dogs. And they appear to have been unable to cheerfully interbreed with other dogs the way all true canids can.

We'll probably still keep calling them dire wolves, though, the way we call Chrysocyon brachyurus "maned wolves" even though they also are not, ya know...wolves.

So, here's a thought, scientists: Have you compared dire wolf DNA to Chrysocyon brachyurus, another highly-specialized dog that doesn't count as a true canid...and also apparently native to the New World.

Just a random thought.

It's Not Aliens, But...

 ...Ganymede is broadcasting FM radio. It's caused by the interaction between Ganymede and Jupiter's magnetic field.

It's just slightly amusing that's in a frequency we use to listen to music. The solar system is fun.

Friday Updates

First of all, I'm safe. I was nowhere near downtown or the Capitol on Wednesday.

Second of all, The Secret History of Victor Prince is all done bar the cover art. As it's a prequel, it's going to be a soft launch; I'll let everyone know when it's out. But it involves Victor Prince, our wonderful wolfy friend Tag, and a new character whom I love...and it's as much her redemption arc as his, so I'm quite happy with it.

Next I'm going to start working properly on the Council of Worlds series. I have the first draft of volume 1, Kyx done, but it's kind of rough and needs some work. There are going to be five books in this series and it's my intention to try and release them fairly close together. We'll see how that ends up working. The pandemic has not been conducive to creativity!

Is the Earth Speeding Up?

So, whoah. Time is going a little faster than normal.

For some reason, the Earth's spin has sped up, to the point where we might have to take a negative leap second to sync solar time back up with atomic time.

Why is this happening? Up until last year, the Earth was slowing down. In fact, some variation in spin rate (and we're talking milliseconds here) is normal, depending on things like, oh, the amount of snow, the amount of volcanism.

It's possible it's caused by global warming. Or not. Either way, we aren't about to all go spinning off, but it's causing some arguments about, well. Time. And how we keep everything synced.

Ooh, Pretty

 Because we all need a distraction right now, follow this link for some amazing pictures of the Valles Marineris.

The largest canyon in the solar system, and it's absolutely gorgeous.

And we don't know how it formed. It can't be water, Mars never had that much. The theory is it's a rift valley of sorts, formed by the creation of Olympus Mons.

And if we ever put people on Mars, it might be pretty good real estate.

Wait, I've Been Using What to Mount My Horse

 So, for the last ten years, somebody has been using a slab of marble as a mounting block.

Until she noticed that it had a laurel wreath carved on it.

This woman had, for ten years, been using a second century Roman engraving probably made in Greece, that appears to have been celebrating Demetrios son of Metrodorus, probably for his athletic achievement, as a mounting block.

Go figure.

Needless to say she's now selling it at auction...and presumably buying a new mounting block.

Because these things happen in England.

It Doesn't Look Like Much...

But the photo linked here is a picture of a sample from the Japanese asteroid sample return mission.

But this rock is 4.5 billion years old, probably about the same age as the Earth...except that all the rocks on Earth have gone through changes while that just...sat there wandering around in space.

Thus, it might teach us something about the origins of our planet.

Happy New Year!

 Here's hoping that 2021 will be better than 2020. Even for those for whom 2020 wasn't that terrible.

No updates...I've been busy, but not with stuff I can talk about yet.