Maybe not all of them, but it turns out that crows will take proper care of better tools than plain sticks.
This goes even if the good tool was made by somebody else...like, say, a friendly human.
I wonder what thank you is in crow.
Was there a dinosaur civilization? The more I find out about bird intelligence, the more I wonder.
A big one.
Turns out that the launch of the JWST was managed well enough that the likely life of the instrument has been more than doubled...from the original 5 years to more than 10!
Somebody got the fuel calculations very right indeed. Spiriyual descendant of the Apollo-era computers.
I salute them. Thank you.
...and they'll be ours. Researchers are developing a design for a levitating drone that could be useful for exploring the moon and large asteroids. It works by manipulating the static charge generated by solar plasma in the absence of an atmosphere and uses very little fuel.
Makes one wonder...
https://www.sciencealert.com/mit-scientists-invent-a-flying-saucer-that-could-cruise-across-the-moon
So, how are mantle materials from the Galapagos winding up in Panama? The answer appears to be a hole or crack in the continental plate and some kind of mantle flow...does the mantle have "rivers"? Ot seems possible.
Or there are dinosaurs down there.
...and you can track its progress here.
Yes, it is already more than a quarter of the way to L2. The initial voost is followed by a long coast, so it will slow down.
The high rate antenna just deployed and everything seems nominal. of course the fun of sunshield and mirror deployment is yet to come. I think some people are going to get stiff fingers from crossing them.
Santa isn't going to need Rudolph's nose this year...his way will be nicely lit by unusually bright auroras, triggered by a solar storm that arrives today.
Happy Holidays, sun!
Did you know that sea water is magnetic? Well, it is. And this is leading to new possibilities for predicting tsunamis. The microscopic magnetic changes before a tsunami can be matched to the height of the wave, helping inform who should evacuate. It doesn't give much more warning, but every little bit helps.
Hand has been repaired. Anyone know of any good dictation software for Mac? The built in is just not accurate enough.
Our possibly cursed, haunted pandemic-era Worldcon is in the can!
There was totally not a fire. We should have left a wee dram in suite 870 for the ghost.
My Worldcon was awesome. Only bad moment was technical problems trying to do a virtual item from the hotel. We have a few things to learn there if future Worldcons do more virtual programming.
And the highlight. The slowly dawning realization during the archaeology panel...let's just say me and Marie Brennan had a same dig moment! (Castell Henllys in mid Wales, which is apparently now a quite well pit together open air museum). I wish I could have seen my own face.
Oh and I have a new Aitune Press mascot but have to wait to do some alterations which will require two working hands.
I'm broken. Fell off a horse and fractured my hand. My dominant hamd Whee! Special edition illegible autographs... WorldCon appears to be jinxing authors...Hildy Silverman is marketing our reading session as "The Walking Wounded Tour"
Signed a contract with The Land Beyond the World Magazine for publication of "The Face of Our Fear."
One of the issues astronauts experience is changes in vision. Most astronauts on the ISS have to wear glasses during their flight. Microgravity causes changes in the shape of the eyeball.
Researchers have now developed a special sleeping bag which pulls fluids back out of the brain. It might also help with potential cardio problems and the brain fog astronauts sonetimes experience. One wonders if it could also be useful for people who are bedbound for a long period of time.
Welp, I'm broken. I managed to have the worst horseback riding fall of my adult life right before WorldCon, and wrote my dominant hand
This means anyone getting a book signed at wildcard will be getting a special edition completely illegible autograph. I cannot write with my left hand I figured this would be more entertaining than dropping out.
I have an appointment with the hand doctor before the con so I will have more of an idea than what my treatment plan actually is. Sadly, that's my only news. I wish I had some good news to mitigate it with, but not right now. Also, text to speech sucks.
At least if you don't live in a place with light pollution and, currently, a lot of clouds.
Comet Leonard is here. You will need binoculars or a small scope to see it, and you will have to get up before sunrise. Or wait until right after sunset.
This article explains how to find it. It's not a very big or bright comet, but 2021 hasn't been a year for comet viewing, so it's what we have.
Do we really want to check out the cube on the far side of the moon? Of course we do!
The cube-shaped object is probably an unusually square boulder, but it could be obtrusive, meaning it was knocked out by an impact. So it could teach us something.
But also, cube on the far side of the moon.
Because the Yutu 2 rover is small and slow it will take it 2 to 3 months to crawl the 260 feet to the cube to find out what it is, but we're doing it. Because of course we are.
All these worlds are yours...
Those geeks at NASA finally managed to come up with a way to do it. Well, technically it's Brigham University, but...
...we now have a Solar-wind with Hydrogen Ion Exchange and Large-scale Dynamics team. Because of course we do.
I needed the laugh this morning.
The science they are doing is fascinating, too, they're exploring the shape of the heliosphere, which protects us from cosmic radiation. And is, thus, also a shield. We are, however, yet to have a helio-carrier.
Having flashbacks to a certain very famous short story on finding out that there will be a solar eclipse in Antarctica.
In the middle of summer, when the sun doesn't set.
Then I got a little more serious.
Imagine you live in the far north, above the Arctic circle. You're, say, one of the Sami people, who do range that far north.
And the sun goes out in the middle of summer.
Imagine how scared, not knowing the mechanism, you would be.
Now, what could well hit your brain is "Something ate the sun." Something fast enough to catch the sun. Something like, say, a wolf.
The Sami influenced Norse mythology in a number of ways...no doubt stories exchanged around a campfire in a harsh environment by traders.
So, is the Ragnarok story of the Fenrir wolf eating the sun...actually a folk memory of a solar eclipse in the middle of Arctic summer.
Somebody who has more time can do the math and work out how likely this is, but it seems so, so plausible.
Also Nightfall.
Stanford engineers have reverse engineered the amazing talons of the peregrine falcon to create a drone that can perch on trees and potentially capture other drones, possibly without damaging them. The point of perching is that hovering uses a lot of battery life, but landing on the ground means you lose the drone's capabilities.
Potential use cases include acting as a camera trap in rainforest canopies or in high canopies such as redwood or Scots pine forests (counting crested tits!), assisting with wildfire watch in California, or taking out drones that fly too close to airports in a less disruptive manner than having to shoot them down.
Or...well, we can think of a lot. Some of them more nefarious (surveillance) than others. It's also kind of adorable.
...along with pretty much every other piece of science fiction set in the asteroid belt.
The Canterbury would have been completely unnecessary. Turns out that a cubic meter of asteroid dust may contain...as much as 20 liters of water.
Belters would not need to resupply for water at all, and would likely be growing at least some of their food.
Oh, and if you have water, you also have oxygen.
The asteroid belt is wet. And that changes a lot of things.
