Remember when that big Chinese rocket had a stage fall in the ocean and we were all worried it was going to land on somebody's house?
Welp.
Yup.
They did it again. Same exact variant, so did they think they fixed it or are they cutting corners in the attempt to get their space station up?
Most likely I suspect they thought they had it set up for a controlled deorbit and it didn't work...
No, we don't know where it will land. Hopefully not on anyone's house.
The people who worked on Apollo are getting old. Very old.
This week, Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut we forget about (because he never made it to the moon) died of cancer at the age of 90.
There are still witnesses to the moon landings, but most of them were kids. By the time we get back to the moon again...
...all I can say is. "What kept us?"
NASA is about to finish a four year proof of concept study designed to work out mission objectives for the next interstellar probe.
The goal, as it turns out, is to confirm the shape of the heliosphere, examine the interstellar medium, and measure cosmic rays.
Of course, while NASA has a good amount of money, NASA also has a plethora of ideas; any probe won't be launched for about 10 years, and it won't leave the solar system for about 15 years after that.
And the mission won't complete in my life time, although I should at least see part of it. The full mission profile?
50 years.
Because space is too darn big.
I just found out about this guy.
Ettore Majorana was working on neutrino masses when he decided to take a sea voyage in 1938, from Palermo to Naples.
He vanished.
Without a trace.
The logical explanation, of course, is that he went overboard while nobody was looking (Over 165 people have vanished from cruise ships since 1995, and that's presumably what happened to them too).
But I can't help but wonder if he was disappeared by the Illuminati, aliens, etc.
There's a story in there somewhere...
...so many cute animals only discovered after they become extinct.
I would love to have met the giant cloud rats that used to live in the Philippines and kind of looked like groundhogs with squirrel tails.
Well, until they tried to steal my lunch. Unfortunately, they disappeared not long after humans reached the island, likely meaning they were lunch.
The only piece of news to report this week is that I'm now partially vaccinated!
I got my first shot of Moderna on Tuesday and the only side effect was a sore arm which lasted about 48 hours. It wasn't really worse than I typically get with a flu shot. I was even able to go horseback riding (although I did ask my instructor to go easy on me, just in case).
Of course, this probably means the side effect karma is going to steamroll me for shot two, but it will still be worth it.
So, somebody has discovered a way to make inflatable structures as stable when fully inflated as they are when collapsed.
This would make them much safer. Oh, and you can make them out of anything. Potential uses include emergency shelters, tents...and habitats on the moon and Mars.
So, yesterday I found out that new evidence indicates T. rex was a pack hunter.
Today, there is more news about our favorite scary dinosaur.
Turns out the average walking speed of T. rex was just under 3mph. For perspective...that's human average walking speed. Or thereabouts.
Now, we're still working on how fast T. rex could run, with current estimates giving a range of anywhere from 10 to 25 mph. If that's true, then they could still outrun the average human, but not human athletes.
So, here's an interesting thought.
What if T. rex wasn't built to run fast, with that swinging tail? What if it was built to keep going for a long time.
What if T. rex was built to be an incredibly efficient walker, moving through the landscape and perhaps using persistence hunting as a tactic some of the time, ambush hunting at other times.
The walking and running speeds of T. rex match closest to one particular modern species.
Us.
Interesting, eh?
(Horses walk at about 4 miles per hour, just out of interest).
You know, T. rex, that great big giant dinosaur predator that is pretty much the poster child for dinosaurs are scary?
Yup, just got a lot scarier. Why? It seems, based on fossil evidence from Utah, that T. rex was...
...a pack hunter.
So instead of envisioning one of these giants coming after you...
It also means T. rex had a social structure which means two things:'
The tiny helicopter, Ingenuity, few for 39 seconds. That's not much, but it's longer than the 12 seconds of the first flight at Kitty Hawk.
It's impressive for the first powered, heavier-than-air flight on another planet.
NASA has named the site Wright Brothers Field and in an entertaining publicity stunt, the International Civil Aviation Organization has assigned the site the code JZRO. (Snide comment from my husband: Now British Airways can send your luggage there, although that's not technically true as it's not an IATA code).
Some great reviews on Fix The World already, and it speaks well to Coatsworth that they don't all like the same one or two stories.
Other than that, things are just chugging along here. I should have more news soon, but it's not quite ready for prime time yet.
The InSight lander is in emergency hibernation because of dust on its solar panels, which can't just be cleaned off.
Perseverance is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which is basically a really small nuclear reactor. And the decision was made to avoid this problem.
One of the things we've learned is that you can't use solar power on Mars. Ingenuity is solar powered, but as a tech demo it doesn't have to last long.
For a manned mission, you would be able to clean off the panels, but that would be a waste of valuable time that could be spent doing science.
In other words, for Mars, nuclear power is it. (Before anyone mentions wind, the atmosphere is too thin).
We scream for a variety of reasons. A scream to get help when attacked is different from the screaming on a roller coaster.
Scientists studying screams discovered something interesting: We actually respond more quickly to "positive" screams than to "negative" ones.
That is to say, we react faster to somebody screaming in joy than we do to somebody screaming in pain. Which seems counterintuitive, because an "alert" scream would tell us there's a predator or a danger.
But it led me to an interesting thought.
Gibbons.
Gibbons are a type of small ape. They're highly arboreal, highly social, and they sing. One species, the siamang, even has an inflating throat sac so they can sing even more loudly.
They sing duets with their mates, they sing to mark their territory. It's a beautiful sound, but it's also loud. Trust me. There's a zoo in England with a major gibbon breeding program (Twycross in Leicestershire) and if you stick around to closing time they will serenade you.
Loudly.
And it's possible that the singing serves a similar purpose to, oh, wolves howling. Which humans find it very tempting to join in with.
It's kind of tempting to join the gibbons too.
Is joyous screaming something our hominid ancestors engaged in for the same reason? Do singing and screaming in joy share roots?
Do our brains tune in to joyful screams because at one point that was how we communicated over a distance in the forest?
It's...a thought.
People in Palm Beach were treated to nature's fireworks last night...and the culprit was an asteroid.
The small asteroid, 2021 GW4, appears to have bounced off the Earth's atmosphere and a chunk was knocked off. Made quite the fireball.
2021 GW4 was a harmless asteroid...about the size of a car, it would not have survived to hit the planet even if it had hit full on.
But pretty fireball makes me jealous.
I knew there was something I forgot.
This anthology dropped on Saturday and already has some great reviews. It contains 12 stories that take an optimistic (and often queer) view of the future...stories in which people address climate change, racism, and all the other things that are wrong with the world.
It contains my story "As Njord and Skadi," which is only lightly science fiction and is really about relationships...and climate change...and how the fix for a problem might not be the obvious one.
This is the first anthology from Other Worlds Ink. and it's a great start!
Buy your copy here.
Still beavering away on the new series. It's likely that I won't release book one until at least book two is ready to go so that people aren't waiting as long.
Other than that, no real news this week.
It would have been nice, but it doesn't actually work.
It turns out that every indication that the EmDrive produced any thrust whatsoever was a false positive.
In fact, what the experiments were detecting was heat causing the fastening elements on the measuring scale to warp. Oops.
We're going to have to look elsewhere for a faster way to travel through space.
The tiny helicopter is now surviving on Mars alone and tests of the onboard imaging system (i.e. the camera) have been successful.
The next step is to unstrap the rotors and test the motor. If this goes well, Ingenuity might fly as soon as Sunday.
(Ingenuity is purely a tech demonstration mission and will not be doing any science, but if it flies we'll get some neat pictures).
Sorry, vegetarians, but our ancestors may, in fact, have been carnivores and specialist pack hunters.
The theory is that based on genetic evidence and the non-existence of tools for obtaining plant food until relatively recently.
We hunted large animals. Our stomach acid is designed to break down meat, including old meat. We probably invented cooking not to make our food easier to digest but as a means of preservation.
Then something happened. We started to eat more plant food. This change appears to have happened about 85,000 years ago in Africa, and about 40,000 years ago in Asia and Europe (The article doesn't mention North America, probably because the research was conducted in Israel and distance).
Except there's something else that happened in Europe and Asia about 40,000 years ago:
The extinction of Neanderthals.
There's already evidence that Neanderthals were, if anything, even more into hunting large animals than we were.
Did the Neanderthals die out not because of fighting with us, not because of carrying capacity (My personal theory until now because of their higher caloric needs) but because they weren't able to make the switch to eating a more plant-based diet? Could it be that because of the cold they were, like modern Inuits, more heavily adapted to subsisting entirely on meat?
It's possible...and puts a somewhat different spin on things (and makes Jean Auel another step wrong, poor woman).
So, it turns out the Chixculub impact did more than wipe out most of the dinosaurs (yesterday I was wishing it had done a more thorough job when a crow woke me up by cawing right outside my window at 8am when I wanted to sleep in).
It also completely changed tropical forests.
Before the impact, the dinosaurs roamed through conifer-rich, sparse forests with a much thinner canopy. This, no doubt, gave more space for larger animals.
Modern rainforests are broad leaved, full of flowering plants and tangles of vines.
They've proposed three theories for why, all of which might be correct:
It took a while, but Balticon is finally posting the panel recordings from last year. Here's the ones I was in:
Retcons and Continuity Errors in Doctor Who
Post-Apocalyptic Fashion Dos and Don't's
Looks like So You Want To Build a Galactic Empire isn't up yet, so I'll post again when it is.
If you want to see other people talk about cool stuff, the Balticon Youtube Channel is here.
And don't forget that Balticon 55 will also be virtual, Memorial Day weekend, and I'll be...talking about something. What is as yet undecided.
Ga-Mohana Hill is a sacred place in the Kalahari, linked to Nnoga ya metsi (the Great Water Snake).
Now we have evidence that this site may have been sacred to humans for over 100,000 years.
The evidence takes the form of a small cache of calcite crystals that were, based on analysis, brought to the site 105,000 years ago. Votive offerings, perhaps? Or the priest's collection of healing crystals?
We might never know, but combined with evidence of people eating around the site, it tells us that humans have been using Ga-Mohana Hill as a place of prayer for countless generations. (And this is an "at least." The site may, of course, be far older).
It's making me feel al little bit small.
