Listen to this sound.
Creaks, heavy breathing, mysterious footsteps. It's the stuff of nightmares.
Somebody's definitely in the attic. And I think they're eating up there. I don't want to know what they're eating.
Spoiler space!
It's a sonic representation of the Earth's magnetic field. It's one of the good guys, people. But wow for CREEPY.
We all get the occasional nightmare. For people with nightmare disorder, however, nightmares become a nightly parade of terror.
Therapy is the answer, typically something called imagery redirection therapy, where you mentally rehearse your nightmares and then change them to something better.
But a new study shows that associating a pleasant sound with something good and then playing it into your ears during REM sleep dramatically reduces nightmares.
Amusingly, they used the piano chord C9. But I suppose you could use any sound you liked. Because ya gotta hack your brain to get rid of nightmares.
I just found one which said we're "due" for a massive solar storm comparable to the worst one in history, which according to these people, was in AD774-775, based on tree ring data, and doesn't map to solar activity.
Aliens?
And now they're claiming this happens every 1,000 years and another one will hit us soon, and it will start forest fires and basically, yup, we're all going to die.
It's estimated at 10 times higher than the Carrington event. And it would, of course, send us back to the stone age, and we're all going to die.
But a solar storm that doesn't correlate with sun activity? And one of the team says there is a "one percent chance" of seeing this within the next decade.
Except we already had a solar storm about a thousand years after this one. Ya know, the Carrington event. True, it wasn't nearly as powerful, but...
I don't buy it. Of course, I can't read the actual study because it's paywalled. Including any of the caveats.
There was also a pretty bad one that "turned the skies red in the north" in East Asia (auroras coming south).
Then there's the one we just dodged in 2012, that was Carrington strength.
Yes, this is why we need to learn to predict these things (if you turn everything off before the storm hits, it will be fine). But I'm finding this one a little hard to buy. And grumbling about paywalls.
Stars are born in nebulae, right?
But they can have other origins too. One is apparently when galaxies collide. The collision between IC1623, actually two galaxies, is generating stars at 20 times the rate of the Milky Way.
And the James Webb has let us actually see this. Galaxies spawning stars when they...I mean, it kind of is a form of mating, isn't it.
Sometimes I see stars as alive. Now is one of those times.
...Well, not really. Yes, we can now use fMRI to read thoughts without electrodes, but we can't do it from across the room.
And by reading thoughts we mean the semantic meaning of thoughts, not word-for-word translations. The primary use of this technology, ultimately, would be to allow thought control of devices without the need to implant electrodes. This could be anything from a completely paralyzed person controlling their wheelchair (and potentially a speech synthesizer) to "Alexa, play..."
fMRI machines are way too big to do this just yet and the likely first use will be mobility and other devices for the disabled when we do crack it.
And possibly the thought police. Let's hope not, though.
We keep going back and forth about the chances of planets orbiting red dwarfs being habitable.
GJ1252b is evidence for, sadly, at least fewer of them being so. The planet is so close, because this star is so cold, that its atmosphere is being blown off.
No atmosphere = no volatiles = no life. We're more likely to find something in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Of course, this is just one planet, and we have a lot more research to do. Especially as GJ1252b is, in any case, too close to be habitable based on temperature. It's not even in the habitable zone. But some scientists are, indeed, saying this is a bad sign.
(But what an interesting mining colony...if we could survive the temperatures).
...and less light pollution, head outside tonight with a blanket. It's the best night to see the Orionid meteor shower, which is caused by Halley's Comet.
Makes me wish I wasn't living in a city...ah well.
We don't know a lot about what kind of social groupings Neanderthals lived in...and we don't want to assume that they were like ours. Like any of ours. Neanderthals, like humans, may well have varied.
But the remains of 11 Neanderthals in the Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains proved to be closely related, indicating that they were part of an extended family or clan that lived in that area. They even found a father and daughter (likely indicating that the father lived with or near his mate). The circumstances show that the 11 people were likely killed in some kind of disaster or freak weather. As this is Siberia, a blizzard is a reasonable suspect.
The pattern also showed that at least these Neanderthals were patrilocal, that is women moved in with their husbands in most cases not the other way around.
Of course, this is one group and likely reflects only Siberian Neanderthals. Again, we arrange things differently in many places, so likely they did too.
There are some astronauts that are household names. Neil Armstrong, of course. Buzz Aldrin. But other names are known only to space geeks.
The Apollo program featured numerous astronauts, including the first American to walk in space, Edward H. White II.
James A. McDivitt was the commander on that mission, Gemini 4.
In 1969, he commanded Apollo 9, which everyone forgets about. It's the mission where they tested the lunar module. People tend to forget about test flights.
Like all of the Apollo astronauts, McDivitt was an air force veteran. He joined the Air Force in 1951 and was accepted for pilot training with zero experience. He flew 145 combat missions in the Korean War then went to the University of Michigan to study aeronautical engineering...and that's where he met Edward White.
NASA was apparently quite willing to send best friends up together. Which makes sense. There wasn't much space in that capsule!
After Apollo 9, McDivitt was promoted to manage the program. He retired in 1972.
White, unfortunately, was killed in the 1967 Apollo 1 preflight fire. McDivitt spent many years as a private consultant.
He passed away yesterday at the age of 93. Apollo is vanishing into history.
Let's remember everyone who played important roles, not just the men who walked on the moon.
...right?
Well, apparently, black holes can and do burp. Three years ago, a black hole at the center of another galaxy swallowed a star.
Now it's got indigestion and is spewing bits of said star. Which we didn't think could happen, but that's the wonder of science.
We don't know what we don't know.
Which happens a fair bit. But we just detected a gamma ray burst that can only have been produced by a star 30 to 40 times the mass of the sun going supernova.
Don't worry, it's 2 billion light years away. And was still bright enough to saturate our detectors, because gamma ray bursts are ridiculously bright.
Now it's most likely a black hole...and has been for longer than our species has existed. Humbling, right?
They have introduced an award for best science communicator!
This is of interest to anyone writing hard SF, because these are people who can help you with your research. Also, encouraging scientists to communicate their work better is a good thing.
Here are the various winners:
All people who's work you should watch out for if you're trying to understand a knotty problem...not to mention the fact that hard SF is itself a form of science communication.
We have now developed a system to detect when a red supergiant is going to go supernova.
And it's familiar to everyone who knows about tsunamis.
You know. When the ocean goes away, run, because it will come back.
Turns out that right before a star explodes, it dims so drastically from released material that it might actually disappear.
What we don't yet know is how long before it explodes, except that it appears to be less than a year.
But hopefully enough time to point our telescopes in the right direction.
Of course, if you're near the star when this happens, you may want to, well.
Run.
So, the preliminary results are in and yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have moved an asteroid.
Because it hit harder than planned, it moved the asteroid further than planned. Which is a math issue.
This was a proof of concept. It showed that controlled impactors can indeed potentially deflect an asteroid, and the cost compared to the cost of a major strike is, well, minimal.
Planetary defense is go.
Of course, there's a lot more work to be done, including more precise long term measurements that will help us do that tricky math.
It seems that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had another effect too. An earthquake.
An earthquake that lasted for weeks.
Maybe even months.
This would have been 50,000 times more powerful than the 2004 Sumatra quake. You know, the 9.1.
So if you are planning on fictionally destroying the Earth with a giant asteroid...don't forget the giant earthquake. Yeouch.
Small wonder most large animals didn't survive.
The crows are outside laughing.
The CAPSTONE spacecraft is back under control. Phewf. That would have been a quite expensive piece of hardware to watch spin off into space.
Seems that a software issue was causing a thruster valve to stay partially open. But as it was a software issue, they were able to patch it and regain control.
Imagine being that coder...
The Indian Space Organization has announced that the mission of the Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter is officially over.
The orbiter's design lifespan was six months. It lasted eight years. Stuff that is built to handle being flung off the planet often lasts longer than initially intended.
The craft has now lost power and will eventually crash into Mars.
Originally intended as proof of technology (or perhaps more accurately as India showing they could do it), Mangalyaan did some really good science that often went unnoticed. This is the orbiter that created the atlas of Mars' poles and helped us better understand how dust storms on Mars really work.
It also proved that sometimes cheap and rugged is better than expensive and high tech. Worth remembering that sometimes, you really need the space equivalent of an old Land Rover.
One of the biggest issues with coming back to Earth from space is that our atmosphere protects us from impacts quite nicely.
I mean, we still get some, but compare the moon.
Unfortunately, our atmosphere also "protects" us from our own returning spacecraft. Friction as the object enters the atmosphere causes intense heat that can destroy a spacecraft.
The Columbia accident shows us what happens when the technology we use to protect our ships fails.
Next week, NASA will launch a test of a new kind of protective technology. The LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) mission will test an inflatable heat shield. If it works, then it will significantly reduce the weight of heat shields...and thus the cost of getting the craft off the planet in the first place.
It's primarily intended for Mars, but may also be used for large return payloads to Earth...such as if we start mining platinum or other rare materials from near earth asteroids. The weight of the shield has historically limited what we can return.
Wishing them luck (and wondering how I never heard about this until today).
...but don't worry, not for about 300 million years. We've finally got some good predictions for how continental drift is going to shape up, and in that time the continents will come back together.
And the lead current theory is that the Pacific ocean will close, America slam into Asia and...
...we'll end up with "Amasia." Then eventually things will shift and they will come apart again. Probably in a different way.
Even the map isn't static, and I don't mean small countries in Europe coming together or splitting apart...
It's a familiar argument. Does life need to be based off of carbon and use water as a universal solvent?
Maybe. Certainly our kind of life does. But life also needs to not be wet for certain things to happen. So, how does that even work?
Apparently, it works because water isn't always wet. Or rather, the reactions that start to form our kind of life need the water to have an edge. They happen where waves lash against a shore, where a stream goes down a slope.
This means something...it would be a lot harder for life to form on an entirely ocean world where there's nothing to break the water up.
(An underground or underice ocean is another matter, as water would be moved against the ice by various processes, so this doesn't mean Europa is out. And there is always not our kind of life).
Thank you to everyone who bought books!
Panel-wise, we did a panel on Gaming and SFF in which we had a preliminary discussion about, no kidding, board games as a storytelling mechanism. This warrants its own panel! (Mostly we were focused on the traitor mechanic).
I also very much enjoyed moderating the panel on Poverty, Class Divides and Inequality in SF. Which needed at least another hour as we didn't even get to alien class systems, UBI/replicator economies or the difference between absolute and relative poverty. Whewf. There's so much there.
Hurricane Ian did dump some rain on us, but never at a time I needed or wanted to leave the hotel ;).
Looking forward to next year already.
