Apparently, just as easily as on Earth. You just use a lens to focus sunlight to melt the lunar dust, turn it into tiles, and put them together. The only thing you need to take is the lens. And some people or robots to do the actual construction work...
(Science fiction writers writing about lunar colonies take note. This technique could be used for more than just roads!)
...and so are pretty pictures. Like this image of the stellar nursery NGC 364.
Lots of dust. And now we can get a good count of the stars and protostars. We'll learn about star formation.
But I sort of want to hang that on my wall.
One of the things birders like is when a poor bird gets lost. It was trying to fly to Newfoundland and winds up in Scotland.
(In the U.K. "twitcher" was a derogatory term for people who chased those birds and trampled all over people's property on the way).
We now know why migratory birds (and sometimes local birds) get lost: Space weather. Solar flares can interfere with their ability to navigate using the magnetic field and cause them to wander way, way off course.
There have been instances of these lost birds getting help from the handy humans to get back on track...by hitching rides on ships going the right direction. Apparently cruise ships going across the North Sea routinely have passengers too, but those birds are just being lazy and smart ;).
In 2029, a NASA mission will reach the asteroid Psyche. Psyche is metal. Very metal. The estimate is about 60 percent. We don't know how it got so metal.
Metal asteroids like this could contain valuable resources for building in space, where you don't need to pull them out of a gravity well.
Or, perhaps, it's aliens.
Nah.
Definitely not.
...not if you're a bee.
Bee sex is determined by the Csd gene, which has more than 100 variations. Except...that it's still the same. Two different alleles, girl. Two of the same, boy.
But you don't want to be a sexually produced boy bee. Drones are produced via asexual reproduction and reproduce only outside the hive.
So, what happens to male workers?
Infanticide. The eggs are "not raised." Which is probably a euphemism, nothing's wasted in a hive.
No, we don't currently know how the workers can tell. Scent is the lead theory.
Why do we care? It could be useful for breeding better bees.
...including a 1.2 mile tall dust devil. 200 feet diameter. Moving at about 12 mph. They couldn't see the top of it, but they were guessing the height. Perserverence snapped it.
Dust devils on Mars get huge because of the lower atmospheric pressure. And dust storms can encompass the entire planet.
If writing stuff on Mars...here's some bad weather for you to use.
Oh, and they can come with lightning too!
NASA has a problem. You know that asteroid sample.
They got more than they bargained for. Specifically the dark fine-grained material on the inside of the lid and base was unexpected. And could give us SCIENCE sooner than we thought. What an excellent problem to have!
One of the things the JWST discovered was a swarm of mysterious early galaxies that were just...too...bright. They didn't have time to form enough stars.
Now we've worked it out. They aren't massive, but it turns out that in the early universe, stars may have formed more explosively, in rapid, bright bursts. As galaxies got bigger, the process (gas ejection from supernovas) became impossible.
It's kind of like a forest. Large numbers of saplings grow in a young forest but are crowded out in a mature one, resulting in steadier replacement.
NASA found enough funding to continue to monitor the New Horizons spacecraft until the end of the decade.
The mission will now be to explore another Kuiper Belt Object, but they are yet to announce which one. In 2028 or 2029 the craft will leave the Kuiper Belt.
There's a significant source of carbon dioxide on Europa. And it seems to be leaking from the subsurface oceans.
Could this mean there is life? It seems pretty likely. Complex life? Unlikely...
It's...complicated.
We thought it had an atmosphere, but observations by the JWST showed it didn't.
But we also now know that stellar contamination makes observations of close in exoplanets hard. Is it an atmosphere? Or is it a starspot?
What this means is that when looking for life signs from a distance, you also have to model the star. Which means you can't do it in five minutes...you might have to take a couple of years to do it. Bear that in mind when sending out your fictional exploration ships?
Earth could become uninhabitable to mammals, specifically, in about...250 million years. That's about the same amount of time they've been around.
Why?
The cycle of continent formation will bring the continents back together into an equatorial supercontinent, nicknamed Pangea Ultima.
This will result in extremely hot temperatures in the center of the supercontinent. Mammals might survive along the coast.
Then there will be 2.5% more energy from the sun. We're talking average monthly temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit here.
Reptiles or dinosaurs/birds might become more dominant again, but small mammals might survive until the continents split again...and then re-evolve. Maybe.
But there's one group of mammals that might not have problems.
Cetaceans might survive, even thrive. Their return to the water is generally believed to be permanent, but who knows?
As for humanity? If we're still around then, then we might have to move into the water ourselves.
Turns out the sample container contains black dust. And probably some more stuff, but we won't know until next month. Right now we're just checking that there's something in there. And there is!
Unfortunately, it appears that Chandrayaan-3 did not survive the lunar night. It went into dormancy and attempts to regain contact have failed.
This was not surprising; the lander was meant to have a 14-day mission duration and anything they got after the night was a bonus. It's still a bit disappointing, though. We could have got even more good science done.
Even without this, though, the mission has already been declared a success.
...asteroid bits. The Osiris-Rex capsule touched down successfully in Utah (the main spacecraft will now do a gravity assist maneuver and zoom off on another mission).
Now we have 250 grams of asteroid bits to study and the knowledge that we can do this again with other samples.
While Osiris doesn't have another sample capsule, its next destination is Apophis, which it will study close up. Yeah, that's the one that's going to kill us all according to the tabloids (spoiler, it's not).
The mission will drop its cargo of asteroid samples in Utah on Sunday morning. The sample will be carefully stored to prevent it from being contaminated by Earth's environment; it's carbon rich and may contain water.
This is some of the oldest material in the solar system. What will it tell us about our origins?
Yes, diamonds can be pink...but the coloration is extremely rare in natural diamonds.
We now know what caused them. The vast majority of these diamonds come from one place, Argyle in Western Australia. Pink diamonds are created deep in the earth's crust because they require heavy tectonic pressure.
In other words, there are probably a lot where we can't get to them. But in Argyle, the crust got stretched, magma was pushed up to the surface, and it deposited the colorful stones. Which tells us where to look for more.
(Or, honestly, we could just make them, but some people, that isn't good enough).
Or at least a wooden shelter. It was found above the Kalambo Falls in wet soil, on the border between Zambia and Tanzania.
Given the location it's also possible it was actually a fishing dock. Either way, it was made by putting logs together in a fairly sophisticated way. Wood seldom survives, and this shows that people were building wooden shelters or platforms...long before we thought.
...it's the sun's fault. We've been hit by a G2 geomagnetic storm, which can interfere briefly with radio communications.
Not a big deal, but it could make your GPS less accurate. Or if you still have a landline...I called my dad and we had static on the cordless phone!
Again, not a big deal (this is only the second highest rating of geomagnetic storm) but now you know what might be messing with your phone...
No, NASA has not confirmed that asteroid Bennu will hit us on September 24, 2182.
Bennu has a 1 in 1,750 chance of hitting the Earth by the year 2300 and a one in 2,700 chance of specifically hitting on that date (although it is the most likely).
Bennu is 500 meters across. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was 6 miles across. So, while Bennu hitting would be bad, it wouldn't kill us all.
What it would do is create a four mile wide crater, knock down buildings tens of miles away and shatter windows 100 miles away. So if it were to hit, say, Los Angeles, we'd have a real life disaster movie.
We're also developing planetary defense systems and if Bennu does start to get too close we should be able to, shall we say, convince it to go somewhere else. If not, we'd likely get enough warning to evacuate the impact site, or coastal areas that might be tsunami'd by a water impact.
(And in any case, 2182 is a while in the future).
NASA published a report they commissioned on studying unidentified anomalous phenomena. The report acknowledges that sometimes people, including trained pilots, see things that can't be specifically identified.
It was put together by a panel representing NASA, the FAA, several universities, and aerospace technology companies. The conclusion: It's worth putting some time and effort into studying these anomalies, understanding them, and analyzing them.
Nowhere does it say "We found aliens." The point is to see what we really have...acknowledging that it could be aliens, but most of the time it isn't.
A: They're all considered autoimmune diseases.
Second A: There's no cure.
Celiac disease can be managed by sticking to a very strict diet that generally precludes eating out or at parties. People with Type I diabetes have to use expensive insulin all the time.
What if we could cure all of these diseases?
A new technology may actually give us the answer. It's called an inverse vaccine. Instead of training your immune system to react to something, an inverse vaccine trains it to stop reacting.
Phase I safety trials have been carried out for celiac disease and are underway for multiple sclerosis.
The technology could also be used to treat Hashimoto's disease and other autoimmune thyroid conditions, pernicious anemia, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and a wide variety of other currently incurable diseases.
It might not be a cure (it might be that people will need to receive "booster" shots to maintain things), but it's certainly better.
I know people with celiac disease and their lives would be changed by this. Let's make it happen!
The James Webb Telescope is doing some fantastic science. For right now, let's focus on K2-18b. This is an exoplanet that is almost nine times the size of Earth (larger planets are, obviously, easier to observe).
K2-18b orbits in the habitable zone of a red dwarf. It would not be particularly great for humans, given the much higher gravity and radiation.
But.
In 2019, Hubble detected water vapor on K2-18b. This made it a good target for the much more advanced JWST.
Which found methane, carbon dioxide and...dimethyl sulfide. We know of only one process that can produce this molecule.
Life.
K2-18b is believed to be a Hycean world, with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a mostly ocean surface.
We need to do follow-up observations to fully confirm (or debunk) the findings.
But there might just be aliens.
Looks like we can potentially make oxygen on Mars. A NASA experiment successfully produced enough to sustain a small dog for 10 hours. That's not a lot, but this was a preliminary experiment to prove the concept, so I'd say it did pretty well.
Any humans sent to Mars will need to stay there a while to justify the trip and they may not be able to take enough plants with them. So, making oxygen from the rock is vital for their survival.
I'm a huge fan, conceptually, of building a giant telescope on the moon. There's now a new paper that introduces the hypertelescope concept...which is a basic optical telescope built in a crater. This would be a huge visual light observatory protected from light pollution and atmospheric distortion.
I still prefer the idea of a radiotelescope, though.
At this point, though, we almost certainly will build some kind of observatory on the moon.
...but we might have to rethink a little bit how they got there. Fujianvenator prodigiosus is one of the earliest bird-like dinosaurs.
And it was a flightless running bird. Long legs, small wings...showing that it had already evolved flight and then given up the habit. Although I actually have a different theory, which paleontologists agree might be possible.
This may be the oldest of the waders...and maybe it did fly, just not very well. Where it was found there were a variety of swamp creatures.
I'm going with wader.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weird-dinosaur-prompts-rethink-of-bird-evolution/
The maximum rate of mutations an organism can tolerate follows a self-repeating fractal pattern.
And nature achieves it in some cases. It appears that nature knows math. Or rather, math is the ultimate tool to understand nature.
Shame I'm not very good at it. I'll be over here with my words.
Apparently, black holes that eat stars have a habit of burping up bits of them years later. In at least 50% of cases, black holes produce radio emissions several years after eating a star.
This shouldn't be possible, but it is. Presumably it's coming from the accretion disk not the hole itself, but black holes getting indigestion is a phenomenon to send your starship to...especially as you would know it was going to happen in advance.
Apparently we'll use anything but actual...measurements.
From my news page, some asteroid sizes:
An airplane (that's a rather wide range)
A six-floor building
A bus
A house (also a rather wide range)
And the winner: 81 bulldogs. French or English?
The Chandrayaan-3 lander has found sulfur (and a host of other elements including oxygen) at the moon's south pole.
Sulfur was in the Apollo samples, but the south pole is likely a better target for manned missions than the equatorial sites Apollo favored. The element is useful for battery recharging and construction work...as well as telling us things about the moon's history.
The sample from OSIRIS-REx will touch down on September 24. Yesterday, NASA did a dress rehearsal, sending a helicopter up to drop a replica sample so that their teams could practice recovering it. They did this just outside Salt Lake City.
The 250 grams of material should give us insights into planetary formation and the origins of the solar system. After dropping off the capsule, if all goes well, OSIRIS-REx will head off to rendezvous with Apophis.
Their worst fear, of course, is that the sample will crash.
Scientists have now discovered how to completely wipe a cell's memory clean so it can be reprogrammed better.
Stem cells are used to treat a variety of diseases and in the lab have been used to create organoids (small replicas of organs) for study. The new cells don't have the epigenetics associated with the organism, and thus will be easier to reprogram with fewer abnormalities. Lab grown organs may just have become a lot easier.
It's a quantum phenomenon...and yes, it's named after that Alice. When a quantum monopole decays, it produces a ring-like vortex that flips any other monopoles passing through the center.
It lasts milliseconds, no more...but it actually lasts longer than the monopole's lifespan. The charge of the Alice ring might also flip.
What does this mean for us? We don't know yet...but could it have something to do with dark matter?
So, some scientists have made thumb-sized squid transparent. Apparently it's hard to find them in the aquarium now. But the point is to observe their biology while they get to live their little squid lives. Technically, they're albino squid, but because of the way cephalopods work...
One of the key study areas is the brain. Squid have pretty large brains, which is why I stopped eating calamari. Injecting fluorescent dye into the brain causes areas of it to light up. For example, they inject fluorescent die into the squid's visual cortex then show it pictures.
We're hoping this will give us knowledge about how all brains work, including ours.
Our sun (and other stars) produces something we call the solar wind. These are streams of charged particles that could theoretically be used to power spacecraft through solar sails.
We now know how those winds are produced. They're made by tiny little picoflare jets...very, very small solar flares...that are produced by coronal holes (darker/colder regions of the sun). This might help us understand more about how auroras happen.
A man is a completely different matter, of course.
But scientists have now completely mapped the human Y chromosome. (Which also means we have sequenced all 24 chromosomes).
The Y chromosome proved to be really complicated. It's small, it's faster evolving, it's highly repetitive. This should allow us to identify genes involved in sperm production, which could help with male factor infertility.
The size varies tremendously between individuals, and this may tell us why some males are more fertile than others.
In contrast to the unfortunate Russian effort, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully touched down close to the lunar south pole.
This makes India the fourth country to land on the moon. The landing was apparently textbook, and includes a rover, a lunar seisometer, and instruments to look for water ice.
The planned mission life of the spacecraft is only two weeks, but if we're lucky we'll get more out of it.
Now I wish somewhere in my neighborhood sold good Indian food...
...and you'll see Antares disappear. The timing is between 10:30 and 11:30pm EDT. Why will this happen?
The new moon will be passing between us and Antares, which is called an occultation, and it's really cool. And no, you won't need a telescope to see it.
Unfortunately, the Luna 25 lunar lander is a complete failure. The spacecraft crashed into the moon after losing touch with mission control.
This was supposed to be Russia's first lunar landing in 47 years. The mission parameters were to study soil and atmosphere at the moon's pole. The craft raced past India's Chandrayaan-3 lander, which is heading for the same region.
Did they rush? Apparently not, but the root cause of the failure could be: The war in Ukraine.
This led ESA to pull out of working on the Luna 25 project, and likely resulted in the loss of important expertise.
(I have mixed feelings...I ain't exactly a fan of Russia right now but I *am* a fan of science).
Check out this picture:
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA
Yes, that's a question mark. Nor is it a hoax. It's not April 1. But it's also a bit more than normal human pattern finding. The universe is giving out side quests now?
What it most likely is is a galaxy merger, with two or more galaxies colliding. The upper part looks like a distorted spiral galaxy and to me I see spiral patterns around the dot too. And it just so happened that we are at the *perfect* angle to see the question mark...
...I have to say.
The universe IS giving out side quests.
Getting flu and COVID? Maybe you're older and have opted for RSV.
A new study shows you should try and get all your vaccines in the same arm. Why? Because it's the same lymph nodes.
This is even more important for multiple dose vaccines, such as Shingrix. Which I also have to get. That one's not going to be fun.
He wasn't blonde and light skinned. New analysis of his DNA indicates that he was going bald, had dark skin, and is closely related to other individuals in...Turkey. Meaning he went a long way to get murdered in that pass.
We thought mummification had darkened his skin, but nope, he was actually that dark. This was before whiteness became dominant in Europe, which was associated with dietary changes from switching to farming over hunting.
It's become even more fascinating!
Generally, students have to travel a good distance to find something cool.
But anthropology and archaeology students at Michigan State got to do a dig on their own campus after their professor located the foundations of the university's original observatory, built in around 1881. The observatory was replaced in the 1960s and everyone forgot it was there until construction workers hit "a large rock."
That makes me excited as a former archaeology student. They can learn a lot from comparing their finds to the historical record and images.
(Working on something with good records teaches good methodology)
Don't worry, the Antarctic strawberry feather star, Promachocrinus fragarius, is at most 8 inches long. It's not exactly a face hugger.
But it does have 20 arms coming from its strawberry-shaped body. Feather stars typically have 10. There's as yet no explanation for the excessive number of arms, or rather tentacles.
https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/antarctic-strawberry-feather-star-discovered-2663713226
It's definitely a little baby cosmic horror, am I right?
The terrible fires on Maui were not caused by Jewish space lasers.
Or by any other lasers. Conspiracy theorists are apparently showing pictures of rocket launches and claiming that plane-mounted lasers were used to intentionally start fires on Maui. Like...what?
They haven't blamed the Jews yet, but you know it's only a matter of time.
...wear a condom.
If we ever colonize space we're going to have to take steps to improve radiation shielding. Earth's atmosphere protects us well from radiation. Our current spaceships, not so much.
And some people are concerned about space tourists trying zero-G sex. Zero-G sex might not result in conception, but if it does, the cosmic radiation could cause birth defects. Attempts to develop mouse embryos in space have not gone well, microgravity decreases testosterone levels and sperm production in male rats, and female rats mated during spaceflight have had early pregnancy loss.
In other words, wear a condom. We don't know exactly what might happen, with the most likely consequence of space conception being miscarriage. But...well.
Wear a condom. Take precautions. And if you don't feel like sex up there, it's the gravity, baby.
There's a huge chunk of granite on the moon. On the dark side. It's 50km wide and it doesn't make any sense.
Granite requires one of two things to form: Plate tectonics or a lot of water. The moon has neither. So, where did this granite come from? Or is it something else...we're guessing granite based on a 9 degree Celsius hotspot likely caused by radiation. (Yes, granite is radioactive, that's why places with lots of it have radon problems).
The lead theory is that there was a mantle plume under it a long time ago that, without plate tectonics, just sat there making more granite.
But to find out, we're going to have to send a robot there to take an actual look.
...of a star, that is. JWST has imaged the Ring Nebula, the remnant of a sun-like star, in incredible detail.
Check them out here: https://www.inverse.com/science/stunning-new-jwst-images-shed-new-light-on-the-iconic-ring-nebula
The images will now be combined with the Hubble image to do even more science! The two telescopes see the universe differently and complement one another.
A skull found in China resembles a combination of Homo erectus, modern man and Denisovans. We think it might be another branch of our family tree.
The skull was that of a teenaged child, and it complicates the path. In fact, the mosaic supports the existence of moderns, Denisovans, and a third lineage at the same time, likely mating with each other.
I'm starting to think that our ancestors really didn't care if they were another species as long as they were hot...
A minor solar storm is expected to hit at about midnight tonight.
It may be bad enough to disrupt mobile and internet communications and there is a *tiny* risk of a power surge that could damage your computer.
May want to turn your computer off overnight and not leave your phone on charge, just in case. It's a very small risk, though. And if you're taking the redeye tonight, it might be a little delayed.
Meteoric iron was used by Bronze Age cultures and may have eventually sparked the idea of smelting terrestrial iron.
Now an unassuming arrowhead found in Morigen, Switzerland in the 19th century turns out to be made from a meteorite...
...one which fell 1,500 miles away. It's 3,000 years old or so and it appears that the value of the metal was recognized such that arrowheads made from it (or the metal itself, but more likely the arrowheads) were being traded long distances.
Iron is superior to bronze, these arrowheads would have lasted longer and it's not surprising. Without metallic meteorites...
Or rather, a new dinosaur ancestor dropped. It's an archosaur that has qualities of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs, specifically bony deposits lining the spine. These deposits would have supported armor.
It's an archosaur, which left two groups of descendants...crocodilians and birds...surviving today. The bony deposits are rare in dinosaurs and unknown in birds, where they would be too heavy, but were seen in stegosaurus and a few others.
But it had something else too.
Feathers.
Feathers. The characteristic was lost and then showed back up in the avemetatarsalian group, which is a fancy way of saying dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and birds. Crocodiles, of course, do not have feathers.
This is showing that traits can be "hidden" for generations and then reactivated when an organism needs them, which I've long suspected.
What could be hiding in our DNA? Plot bunny right there...
...on the joke that the zoo animal is the guy in a costume. I heard a National Park version of it recently, where a guy was hired to give guaranteed moose sightings.
A Chinese zoo has had to deny actually doing that. The sun bear, named Angela, was standing up on her hind legs and really did look kind of like a guy in a fursuit. (There's a video here).
The zoo released a statement in which Angela assured us all she is, yes, a sun bear, and not a human (or a dog, or a black bear).
Sun bears are the smallest species of bear, so the size of a small person, and they are part time bipeds. The females even hold their cubs like women and walk on their hind legs. Oh, and they're adorable.
But definitely not a person in a bear suit!
...you know, the poorly designed one that imploded, killing everyone on board.
The same company now wants to create an outpost on Venus. Uh, sign me right up...not! This is a recipe for disaster and I hope they can't get funding.
The upper atmosphere of Venus is, in fact, feasible to settle. But by those clowns? I think not...
(Also, just as everyone stopped adding -gate to every scandal we got the OceanGate scandal? Thanks, I hate it).
It's technically called parthenogenesis. Some species of whiptail lizard (I had the privilege of seeing a whiptail in California, didn't get a photo, but not sure if it was one of those species) do it routinely, but can't ovulate without sexual stimulation. There are no males. So, yes, they're all lesbians ;).
A variety of species have been observed reproducing asexually in the absence of males. It's most often seen in reptiles, who's sex determination system allows a female to produce both male and female offspring, and is generally a temporary occurrence to help overcome a shortage of males.
Mammals, on the other hand, can't pull this trick. If we could, all offspring would be female (that's the source of trans Jesus jokes). We've managed to do it in the lab. So, human virgin births simply don't happen.
But something in species that can turns on when there aren't enough males. We now have a bit of an understanding as to why, and it involves the humble fruit fly...the standard Drosophila melanogaster used in so much lab work.
We managed to give the species the ability of parthenogenesis that it normally lacks, by using genes from a related species that does have the capability. As with the related species, females only resorted to parthenogenesis (which slows genetic change) when males were not available. But we know which genes are needed now, at least in fruit flies.
Why does this matter? Because stress on insect species induces parthenogenesis, and we're putting stress on pests...is there a way we can reduce the chance of this happening and thus control numbers?
So, what is a boomerang meteorite? It's a rock that gets knocked off a planet, hangs out in space for a while, then comes back.
Some experts think a meteorite found in the Sahara might be a boomerang. It appears to be a volcanic rock and may have been belched out by a volcano with so much force it went into orbit.
But other experts think that it's not from Earth at all, or that it's not a meteorite but just volcanic rock. There's more analysis being done to see if we can work out for sure. It's kind of cool.
A Neolithic burial site in France has yielded seven generations of the same family. Many of the 128 individuals buried in the ancient cemetery turned out to be related. Furthermore, they were burying people next to their closest relatives. At least, their closest male relatives.
The men were all related. The women, not so much, indicating that this society was patrilocal (wives moving in with their husbands on marriage).
They also discovered no half siblings (which seems strange, did these people not remarry after the death of a spouse), indicating a high level of monogamy in this group. Other sites, not so much.
We can't tell much more than this, but it shows an extended family occupying the same land for generation after generation. Farmers living their quiet life. That's a human thing, right there.
...*hours* before they happen. Enough time to remove fragile objects from shelves, to get to a better location.
Earthquakes appear to start about two hours before we feel anything...but GPS units can detect that early fault displacement. It wouldn't be enough time to, say, evacuate San Francisco.
But it would be enough time to turn off gas appliances, reducing the risk of fire. Enough time to, as mentioned, secure fragile objects and take pictures off the walls. Enough time to secure your booze (which can also start a fire in certain circumstances).
And more than enough time to get away from windows, heavy objects, etc.
We just need to do a bit more research so we can reliably detect the pattern.
Or not. Scientists have discovered self-healing metal, but it's not nearly on the scale of T-1000. We're talking copper and platinum at the nano scale.
Basically, tiny cracks in metal can heal through natural cold welding, in some conditions. If we can scale it up, it could be used to slow metal fatigue and extend the life of things like airplane and car parts. But no killer robots.
Yet.
...this exoplanet. It's shiny. It's really shiny. It's albedo is 80%...that's the amount of light reflected. For contrast, the Earth's albedo is 31%, and Earth is already kind of shiny.
It shouldn't exist. The reflective nature comes from metallic clouds that rain titanium. Yeah, this is a pretty hot place. Like most really weird exoplanets, it's a gas giant in a tight orbit...19 hours around a sun-like star. It's five times the size of Earth, a small gas giant. And it actually shouldn't have an atmosphere.
Except that with an 80% albedo what's under the clouds is cool enough to hold an atmosphere.
By the way, the second shiniest planet discovered...Venus with its 75% albedo. That's why it's so bright in the sky. It's shiny.
There's this guy at Harvard who really wants to find aliens. So much so that he keeps finding them.
His latest is that tiny half millimeter spherules that came from a meteor...basically tiny tiny balls..are alien technology. Truth is, that's just what happens when a highly metallic object from space burns up in the atmosphere. You get little spherical droplets of material, called "cosmic spherules."
We can't even be 100% sure these are cosmic spherules as opposed to pollution. These particular spherules don't contain enough nickel to actually be from a meteor. So, uh. They're probably pollution. It's possible they're interstellar.
But that's a zebra.
This guy needs to stop seeing brindle horses.
Space travel often involves explosions. Most of them are unintentional.
This one was actually intentional.
I can't imbed the video, sorry.
Burst testing inflatable things is very important so you know what happens if something goes wrong. Sierra, also building inflatable habitats, has been doing it too.
The inflatable module briefly reached 253 psi.
Inflatable space habitats are an important piece of technology because they can be made very light, reducing the amount of fuel needed to loft them into orbit.
Archaeology is particularly fascinating when dealing with societies that don't have good written records. Determining the phenotypical sex (not gender) of human remains can be a challenge.
Doing it off the pelvis? Not always accurate. Lots of women have "male" type pelvises and vice versa.
Doing it off the grave goods? In some cases we're working out what gender the grave goods indicate based off of...yup. It can get circular.
So more recently we've started using DNA. Now, this can only determine the person's genetic sex. A genetic woman found with male grave goods might be a woman who took on a male role, a trans man, or even a man with no Y chromosome, which can absolutely happen. The first case is typically assumed as most likely. We can't prove trans-ness with no record of the individual, but I do wish researchers would be more open to the possibility. A genetic man found with female grave goods might be a person with AIS.
DNA sexing has two major problems:
1. It's expensive.
2. DNA degrades, so you can't always get a clear read.
Enter proteomics. This means taking a small sample from a bone or a tooth and looking for proteins produced on the sex chromosomes. It's much cheaper.
We can now theoretically determine the genetic sex of every set of human remains we have. And, for example, let's say we are studying a society with very strict gender roles and we find one individual who's sex doesn't match their gender. Or two. A very small number. Particularly if the individuals concerned are buried with female grave goods (men pretending to be women to get ahead is historically rarer than the reverse).
We may actually be able to prove the obvious: Trans people have always existed.
...to our brains. And it's not a constant in the universe either. Turns out that right after the Big Bang, time ran about five times more slowly than it does now. We know this from observing quasars, which are basically cosmic clocks.
Of course, to an observer, time would have been the same as it now. (The reason we observe different speeds of time has to do with our brain making memories, that's why the outgoing trip to a place you have never been to takes longer than the return trip and why time runs slower for children).
It's just another confirmation that Einstein was right.
...of looking at Saturn through the Clark telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. This is a 24" refractor that is no longer used for science (except for high school and undergraduate student projects). For a fee, you can line up for a brief look through it at whatever they decided to train it on that night, which depends on viewing conditions and where everything is.
That particular night, it was Saturn. I could see it as if I could reach out my hand. It was really cool. The telescope might no longer be useful for science (we have far better ones now), but for education? It's a grand old workhorse.
But that little image of Saturn is not as good as this one:
The rings have a much bigger albedo, and you can see three of the moons. This is an image of Saturn taken by the JWST.
It's the same planet I remember seeing through the old telescope, but the shading...and the brilliance of the ephemeral rings...so beautiful.
(The scientific purpose here is to see if Saturn has any more moons we haven't found yet).
This week, the very last Ariane 5 rocket will launch. 116 total launch attempts, including the precise launch of the JWST, saving fuel and doubling the telescope's estimated life.
The retirement of the Ariane 5, which was first launched (and blown up, because that's rocket science) in June 1996 does indeed mark the end of the era. It will be replaced by the more efficient and modern Ariane 6.
(The reason for the retirement is that the older design simply uses more fuel than, say, the Falcon, and thus can no longer compete on launch costs).
It's weird to think that something that has been a staple of space exploitation for so long is now obsolete.
The life cycle of a sun-like star goes through a red giant phase before collapsing into a white dwarf.
The red giant will swallow many of its planets. And it should have swallowed Halla, which orbits Baekdu. Baekdu is already in the helium fusion phase, which happens as the star starts to shrink. Halla is about half as far from Baekdu as the Earth is from the sun.
So, it should have been engulfed. Why wasn't it?
Two possibilities:
1. Baekdu was actually a binary star and the two stars fused, which meant neither was large enough to engulf Halla...the merger caused it to jump straight to the helium phase.
2. Halla is a second generation planet created by...the collision of two stars.
Both theories require that Baekdu was a binary star. (Another obvious theory not mentioned is that Halla is a captured rogue).
I'm totally going to use this in something, by the way.
Yes and no.
The sun has an 11 year cycle of weather and is approaching so-called "solar maximum," which basically means there are more sunspots, more solar storms, and more coronal mass ejections.
The next solar maximum is actually hitting slightly early...it might peak as early as the end of the year. And it's going to be a high one, too.
Which means there's now talk of the "internet apocalypse" and the "destruction" of the internet.
So, what's the worst case scenario? A months-long blackout...which would impact the supply chain and might make it hard for people to get food and, worse, medication... We're so dependent on global communications people would die.
It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be a major disaster. On top of that, we might lose large parts of the power grid...also for months.
How likely is it?
The last event of that magnitude was in 1859, which was called the Carrington Event. It set fire to telegraph lines.
It would be worse now...
...but again, how likely is it?
First of all, the majority of solar storms miss Earth altogether. The sun "burps" in all directions, not just towards our little planet.
Second of all, the majority of solar storms that hit Earth go unnoticed by the majority of people. You might find you can't get normal accuracy when using your cell phone's GPS, for example. Your electronics aren't going to be affected. The vulnerability of the internet is the long (and expensive and time-consuming to replace) cables that run under the Atlantic and Pacific. There IS a tiny, tiny chance that you could get horrendously unlucky and your computer could be fried by one random particle. It would have to be turned on.
The chances of being hit by an apocalypse level flare are actually pretty slim.
And here's the last thing.
Most problems are caused by CMEs. CMEs can take as long as three days to reach the Earth and with the forecasting technologies we're developing, we can see where they will hit.
There is a very, very simple way to protect any kind of electronics from a CME or solar flare:
Turn them off.
As we improve space weather forecasting, we can imagine a situation where we forecast a flare hitting and...turn off the internet for a few hours.
It would suck for those of us who are addicted to social media and video games. But it would prevent a disaster.
With only thin soil, Mars has a wonderful habit of producing odd-shaped rocks. The latest one is this:
Mmm...want a donut? It's a particularly weird rock and some people are theorizing it might actually be, well, alien.
No, not like that. It's possible the "donut" is part of a meteorite, as that would make more sense than it weathering into that shape. Wouldn't that be kind of cool?
One common piece of wisdom is that for a planet to support life, it must have active plate tectonics. Mars is a good example: It's cooled down and is stagnant, and no longer has a lot of life, if any.
Earth, of course, has active plate tectonics...just ask a Californian or an Icelander.
But it turns out that Earth did not have active plate tectonics when life started. Instead, it was in a stagnant lid phase, with no movement of plates and heat being produced through cracks in the surface. Venus is in this state and doesn't appear to have life.
Of course, it's possible plate tectonics, which result in changes of environment over time, are a key factor in the development of complex life and the ability of organisms to evolve and adapt.
25 years ago neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers made a bet.
What was the bet? That the neuroscientist could find the seat of consciousness in the brain. The philosopher, on the other hand, believed that anything with information would be just a tiny bit conscious and that we are conscious because we process so much information.
Koch's theory, on the other hand, is that consciousness is nothing more than brain cells firing in synchrony 40 times per second.
Even without reading further, I know who's side I'm on. Crows show strong signs of being as conscious as we are with a very different brain structure.
And now so does Koch. After studying the matter for 25 years, he's surrendering to Chalmers. Not because he's wrong, but because there's absolutely no way to prove he's right.
In fact, he too is now studying information-based consciousness.
The two have now made another bet. This time, Koch is betting that we will understand consciousness in 25 years. Chalmers is betting that we still won't.
Maybe we never will.
This is an image of a storm on Jupiter. That little green dot that looks like a laser pointer?
That's a lightning bolt. Directly imaged by Juno. Probably the size of a city...but still. A lightning bolt on another planet.
Well, no. But pretty soon we should have a navigation system that works underground and underwater. It could be used by miners...and also carried by spelunkers so they can be located.
It's called muPS because it uses muons, which go through rock. The only obstacle is it needs to be more accurate...and of course we need to build detectors. Those would be on the ground above the area you're exploring (so they could be put over popular cave systems as well as mines, etc). For underwater exploration, presumably, the detectors would be on boats.
Getting it more accurate requires tying it in to clocks for time synchronization, same as GPS.
It's a long way from practical, but it's an engineering problem at this point!
Thanks to 2001, we focus on Europa. But Enceladus is a very similar world.
And we know there's potentially water under the ice. There's energy (hydrothermal activity driven by tidal forces).
There's organic compounds.
And there's phosphorus. Substantial amounts of it. Phosphorus is essential for our type of life. It's never before been found off of Earth. It's used to make DNA. Yes, it's probably possible to have life without phosphorus. But it would be exotic indeed.
There's actually more phosphorus than on Earth, however, which might initially seem like good news...except that that may mean there isn't life because all the phosphorus here is in use, as it were.
What it does mean is that phosphorus is out there...
Enceladus is, in fact, habitable in the broadest sense.
To answer the next question will take a new mission.
Is it inhabited?
We tend to think of grief as human. Maybe, we'll acknowledge, dogs can grieve. Horses can absolutely grieve, I've seen it.
So, higher social mammals?
Birds? Crows show behavior that looks very much like grief.
Insects? Surely not.
Fruit flies?
A study shows that a fruit fly that finds/sees a dead fruit fly...may get depressed. Fruit flies that witness a large number of dead fruit flies can actually live 30% less than ones that didn't.
Does this mean fruit flies grieve?
It's likely that an aversion to large numbers of dead bodies is, in fact, a survival mechanism. So it's possible that grief started as a way to avoid being infected by stuff and led to more complex behaviors...human funeral customs serve, in part, the purpose of properly disposing of corpses so they don't attract disease.
But fruit fly grief being a thing is quite...fascinating.
...is still occurring in Europe today.
The disorder is Dupuytren's disease, which is also called "viking hand disease" and "Dupuytren's contracture." It affects older people and is aggravated by diabetes. It causes thickening of tissue in the palm of the hand, which results in fingers curling in. Right now, there's no cure, although it can be treated by using various methods to break up the thickened tissue. Unfortunately, it comes back.
It also runs in families.
Including mine.
And now they have identified three major risk factors. Two of the three have been confirmed to be...Neanderthal genes. They aren't sure on the third.
But even after all of these generations, people are still getting a disease inherited from Neanderthal's. How?
Dupuytren's disease almost never affects anyone younger than 50. A lot of cases are mild and never require any kind of treatment. It's essentially cosmetic lumpiness in the palm. Even those that are may not impact the person's ability to live.
So, it doesn't affect reproductive fitness in any way. There's zero selection pressure against it. Which allows it to survive.
It's also possible that it is associated with some kind of beneficial trait, such as an immune system trait that helps protect us from certain diseases. We don't know yet.
But this speaks to just how conserved a deleterious trait can be if it doesn't affect your ability to have kids.
Look at it. Not quite as red as we thought...
This beautiful picture of Mars is a mosaic released by ESA, made up from images taken by the Mars Express orbiter using its high resolution stereo camera. Lovely!
It sounds like something out of a superhero comic, but "cosmic diamonds" are real...and quite fascinating.
The penultimate phase of the life of a small star is becoming a white dwarf, which start very hot, but cool down quite rapidly (in cosmic terms).
Sometimes this means the entire star can literally crystallize. When this happens they become a black dwarf, a dead crystal that one might argue is the star's corpse. Theoretically, anyway. The universe is not old enough to confirm this observationally.
But researchers are starting to see it happen in white dwarfs. The crystallization starts with lattices of carbon and oxygen atoms. This process slows the cooling of the white dwarf.
And yes, this might one day happen to the sun, but by then we will long be gone one way or another.
...for people in southern Italy. Looks like there might be a volcano about to pop. Specifically the Campi Flegrei volcano, which has been making noises for about 70 years, but last erupted in 1538.
Good news, it doesn't appear to be about to blow tomorrow.
Bad news, it's a 13-km-wide nested caldera containing 24 craters. And because it's a caldera, not a mountain, there are people living there. As many as 500,000 people could have to be evacuated if it does show signs of erupting, 360,000 of them living in the caldera itself. It's one of the most populated active volcanos on the planet. The town of Pozzuoli is 4 meters higher than it was in 1950...which happened in four stages.
A future eruption is also likely to blanket Naples and surrounding regions in ash.
Of course, now I want to go look at this thing...
...is Everest.
The highest mountain under the Earth doesn't have a name. Maybe a better correlation with be Denali, the tallest mountain on Earth.
They're called ultra-low velocity zones and they're basically folds in the Earth's mantle that can reach more than 24 miles in height, 4.5 times the height of Everest.
And we don't know what causes them at all.
...because there isn't much more solarpunk than living in a mushroom.
Okay, not quite, but mycelium biocomposites could become an extremely useful building material and yes, we mean mycelium as in fungus.
The substance starts with 3D printed wood and then you let the fungus colonize it. Then you dry it once it's finished growing, killing the fungus and bonding it. This emits a lot less carbon than concrete and steal, it's completely fire resistant, it's a good insulator. Right now it's being used to make furniture and partitions. (Imagine a restaurant that specializes in mushroom-based dishes where you sit at fungus tables? Somebody's gonna do it).
Mycelium is already being used to fill cracks in concrete and for insulation, especially of very small buildings.
And it draws down carbon as it grows.
Wanna live in a mushroom?
https://newatlas.com/materials/mycelium-based-building-material-renewable-biodegradable/
...and it's adorable. Frog species can inhabit very small niches. This one lives only on Wei-Assipu-tepui, a small mountain at the border between Guyana and Brazil. It's been named Stefania macculochi. Probably isolated by geographical upheaval.
It's nocturnal, various shades of brown, and the females carry their babies on their backs.
Check out the cuteness here.
Or tentacles? Or...
Five to ten light year long filaments that give off thermal radiation (that is, they're hot) that point towards the black hole.
And no, we have no idea what causes them, but it might have been caused by Sagittarius A* "burping" a few million years ago.
They're one dimensional. They're literally just strings of...something...hot. So I guess tendrils is better than tentacles?
Either way, I love that we keep discovering more about the universe.
We used to think it was so we could walk faster, helping lift the next step.
In fact, the spring like arch in our feet stabilizes our ankle. It does allow us to run more efficiently, but without an arch we wouldn't be able to be full-time bipeds in the first place.
(SF writers designing aliens take note! You need some mechanism to stabilize the lower leg. And furry digitigrades don't work, alas).
If there's no recoil then you walk like a chimpanzee, and they aren't nearly as good at walking upright as we are.
Could this be useful? It could be because some people might have an injury or illness that stiffens up their arches, which then impacts the ability to walk and puts strain on other joints. We might be able to work out some therapy, or even special shoes, that help make the arch more flexible.
...you can pull electricity out of the air. Of course, he was wrong as to how.
So, apparently, you can actually use certain materials to generate clouds. And clouds can produce large amounts of electricity. We've all seen that. It's called lightning.
A thin layer of material designed with very tiny micropores would create a charge imbalance, like that in a cloud, creating a battery that operates as long as there's humidity in the air.
It wouldn't work everywhere. Las Vegas would have problems. Florida would, though, do just fine.
As would many parts of the global south where this would be particularly valuable...
Of course, it's on paper right now. It hasn't been demonstrated in the real world yet.
One of world's deadliest spiders is the funnel-web spider. its complex venom has a range of potential applications.
But funnel-web spider venom is not all made equal. In fact, the venom changes according to the spider's mood.
The Border Ranges funnel-web has different venom composition depending on its heart rate. I.e., the venom composition changes when it is under threat. This probably has something to do with the significant metabolic cost of venom production and "saving energy."
(Nobody has been killed by a funnel-web since 1981, by the way, which is when we developed a good antivenom for the group).
It sounds very fancy, or like it's a chemical reaction.
In fact, it's a word that is used to refer to the fact that crabs have evolved independently at least five times. Carcinization is "turning into a crab."
It's a classic example of convergent evolution, but it keeps happening...albeit only amongst the decapod crustaceans (which also contain lobsters and shrimp and are generally tasty).
King crabs, thus, aren't actually crabs, they're false crabs.
We don't fully understand why being a crab is such a huge advantage, but one theory is that the crab body allows more space for specialized limbs and thus increased versatility over other crustacean.
And decarcinization is stopping being a crab. There's a word for that too.
Crabs are weird.
...dinosaurs had telescopes, they would have seen a smaller ring system around Saturn than we do. That's because Saturn's iconic ring system formed only a few hundred million years ago, tops. It's far younger than the planet, which indicates it was probably formed by some kind of disaster out among Saturn's moons.
And in a few million more years, the rings will be mostly gone. It's a cosmic snapshot and we're lucky as a species to get to see it.
Let's check out the ways:
1. They have remarkable regeneration abilities, and never scar. Like lizards,
2. They have bony plates on their tails. Like...lizards.
3. One species menstruates. Like us. (The list of mammals that menstruate is thin, and other than apes and old world monkeys, it includes elephant shrews and some species of bat).
3. They can shed their skin when grabbed...and then regrow it.
They are strange...although they are definitely rodents! This may indicate that some very strange genes are dormant in a variety of mammals. They're being studied to see if we can use their regenerative capabilities to help humans heal without scarring.
What they are not, however, is mice. They look like mice, but genetics place them in the same group as gerbils.
A: A coronal mass ejection plus a volcano.
Tonga interrupted satellite communications on the far side of the planet by producing "bubbles" in the atmosphere called equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs).
Modeling shows that the combination of a large eruption and a CME could really mess up communications, including GPS (learn to read a map people. You never know) and have significant economic impacts.
So let's hope that doesn't happen. Or rather that we can develop forecasts to predict it, as there's no way of preventing it.
They aren't just fantasy, they're also...possible.
Japanese scientists are studying the use of magnolia wood as a housing/casing for satellites. It's more flexible than metal and lighter. It may also generate less space debris when the satellite eventually burns up at end of life.
Why magnolia? They've done testing, and it holds up well in space, although not fantastically better than others. But it's flexible and strong.
Magnolia wood, eh?
...and point it at Ursa Major. Because there's...a supernova in the neighborhood.
It's actually 21 million miles away, but supernovas are so bright a standard commercial backyard telescope can see it...and some people have even got photographs.
Unless, of course, you live in the city *glares at the light pollution*.
We're going to get some decent data from it, though.
...actually, it's okay. Barring some kind of gravitational perturbation, Earth is safe from planet killing asteroids for at least 1,000 years.
This is good news...we're testing systems that should protect us from smaller rocks.
Yeah, we did the math, and the big rocks, which are the easiest to track, are most likely not a threat. We still have to worry about a city killer, though...
...let's hope we can scale up DART.
Let's try this exoplanet on for size...or plotbunnies. Plotbunnies that are on fire.
LP 791-18 D is about the same size as Earth and in the habitable zone. Because of the type of star it is, its tidally locked. It's also being constantly tugged on by LP 791-18C.
What does this mean?
Volcanoes.
Lots of volcanos.
And tidally locked. The suspicion is that there may be liquid water on the night side.
Oh, and it may have an atmosphere.
Lots of volcanos + liquid water + atmosphere like equals...
...life.
But probably not complex life like us and certainly it would be hard to sustain a technological civilization on a world like that.
We're probably talking, I don't know, sponges here.
But all the ingredients are there. Let's find a starship and go take a look!
You'd think they wouldn't need to, but it turns out hammerhead sharks are weird in another way than their heads.
We're specifically talking about Sphyrna lewini, the scalloped hammerhead sharks. When diving, they close their gills. Why? To keep themselves warm...they're a warm water fish and the deep water is cold. And they can hold their breath for 17 minutes.
Do they have a "dive reflex" like mammals?
Is the dive reflex that old?
Balticon schedule (Subject to potential change):
...coming home to find a hole in your roof and a warm rock in one of your bedrooms.
Yes, somebody in New Jersey was fortunately not home when their house got, apparently, hit by a meteorite. This does not happen very often! About 500 meteorites hit Earth every year, but the vast majority land in the ocean and are never recovered.
The meteorite is now going to be analyzed by the College of New Jersey to confirm what it is (seems the most likely explanation) and its provenance, likely the Eta Aquarid shower.
I have to admit I would keep it if I was them. Quite the conversation piece!
(But imagine the conversation with their insurance company...)
If you have a "snozz" - a tall, thin nose, then it's not just an adaptation to cooler climates.
You can thank your...
...Neanderthal ancestors. It turns out that the gene, ATF3, that significantly contributes to increased nasal height (compare the flat noses many Black people have) comes from Neanderthals.
It's proof of something I've long held...that interbreeding with Neanderthals served the evolutionary purpose of increasing the speed of adaptation to the cold experienced by tropical/African populations as they moved north.
Most white people and quite a few east Asian and Native Americans have Neanderthal noses. Which are better in cold climates.
Oh and central Asians have, it turns out, Denisovan lips.
Interbreeding with a related species is a great way to pick up genetic traits adapted to the environment without having to wait generations to evolve them.
That snake robot, that is. NASA is developing a biomimetic robot based off a snake that may one day be landed on Enceladus. Why a snake?
Snakes handle water as well as land, and the snake will go into Enceladus' under ice ocean to collect samples and bring them back to the surface. Each segment can also have a different capability, including tracks, propellers, gripping mechanisms, etc.
Hiss!
...and it may help us work out more about the Denisovans.
Researchers were able to find human DNA on a pierced deer tooth found in Denisova Cave. The deer tooth had apparently been turned into a necklace.
We now know that the necklace was owned by a single person and was owned, made by, or both by a woman. She was a modern human connected to the Ancient North Eurasians.
The tooth was 20,000 years old.
If we can push it back further we can expand our knowledge of populations that did not bury their dead.
We just caught the first direct evidence of a star eating a planet. When main sequence stars (which includes the Sun) hit old age, they expand, and planets get consumed.
Yes, this will happen to Earth, but in about 5 billion years...by then we'll long since be extinct, have evolved into something else, or transcended into a star spanning civilization. Or all three.
We've known about it, but there's a really cool artist's impression here.
Seems the JWST is so good it has detected water...26 light years away. Associated with a rocky planet. One that should not be habitable because it's too hot, tidally locked...basically Mercury. Which could suggest an atmosphere. Which shouldn't be possible.
But there's another explanation.
The water vapor is actually on the star. Wait, what? Even on our sun, in cool sunspot regions, there's traces of water. The star concerned is a red dwarf, so it's cooler, so it may have its own water.
But either way, that's a pretty huge achievement for the technology.
It becomes supermassive at 100,000 times the mass of our friendly local Sun. That's...honestly inconceivable. The largest we've found are tens of billions times that mass. That's...insane.
And we don't really know how they got that big. Because there are stellar mass black holes, which are typically up to 65 solar masses. Some bigger ones are caused by fusing two together.
There's nothing, though, between that and 100,000. That's one of the universe's weirdnesses.
Want a better idea? Here.
Video courtesy of NASA.
The Zhurong rover has been declared dead (dust on solar panels). But before it died, it found signs that there was water on Mars as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago. And the dunes it was exploring were covered in salt.
Sea salt, perhaps? We might never know. Mars was just that bit too small. Just that bit too cold. Alas.
The most famous sled dog in the world was supposedly a wolfdog.
Now scientists have extracted DNA from his taxidermied remains and established that he had no recent wolf ancestry. A lot of sled dogs just look like they're part wolf.
They did, though, establish that he was healthier than modern dogs and located genes that are associated with improved coordination, healthier joints and thicker skin. I'm particularly interested in the latter; do sled dogs have thicker skin as well as that fur and is that part of how they are so cold tolerant?
Well, now we've directly imaged a jet from a supermassive black hole. The same one that gave us that iconic annular image.
It has tentacles, doesn't it. Maybe it's really an Old One, or that is what an Old One is.
So, how does this happen if nothing can escape a black hole. The jet actually comes from the region directly around the black hole and is stray matter from the black hole feeds.
It's so cool that we can see black holes now!
Turns out the range at which a supernova could destroy a planet's ozone layer has increased from 50 light years to 160.
(I touch on this in my story "The Unrelenting Brilliance Of Day")
But don't worry, we're not all going to die: There are no potential supernovae within the danger zone. Phewf.
(The Earth has, though, been hit before, and it may have accelerated the evolution of life).
Well, it won't smile. But imaged at 60 miles, Mars' moon Deimos is showing us its pockmarked face.
Turns out it's made of the same material as Mars, indicating it was knocked off during planetary formation rather than being a stray asteroid.
It's also nice to see good space science being done by somebody who isn't the U.S., the Chinese, or ESA...the Hope mission that took the images was launched by the United Arab Emirates.
You can't have a rocket program without blowing up the occasional prototype. Unfortunately, the test flight of Starship failed four minutes after launch. The problem was failed separation.
This isn't the setback it might appear; this was a test flight of a prototype. Prototypes sometimes blow up. Space X believes it's perfectly fine to blow up prototypes, unlike NASA. On this issue, I'm with Space X, as long as you get all the blowing up done before you put any test pilots on it.
So, perhaps a slight disappointment, but it doesn't mean it won't fly.
Concrete and cement actually make up about 8% of our carbon footprint. But we can't really stop using a material that has been valuable for hundreds of years (Did you know the Coliseum is a concrete structure).
Engineers at Washington State University may have a solution. The solution is biochar. This has been tried before, but it dropped the strength of the concrete too much.
Their solution "washes" the biochar in the waste water from cement production. The result is still slightly less strong than traditional concrete, but at levels where this can be compensated for. Biochar is made from organic waste, so it locks the carbon in that waste into the concrete. It also sucks about 23% of its weight from the air while making the concrete.
Hence.
Carbon negative. Concrete that locks down more carbon than is made producing it. It also makes use of the waste water, which is highly alkaline and can sometimes cause problems.
They're now looking for builders to help them scale this up. Storing carbon in the built environment is potentially awesome. If used in pavement, the carbon will be sequestered for 30 years. If used in a bridge, the potential is 75 years or even longer.
This reminds me of the spam I keep getting where using the right type of concrete will help me attract girls...
https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2023/04/18/researchers-develop-carbon-negative-concrete/
Green lines seen in the sky over Japan that looked like somebody was shooting Godzilla have been confirmed to be...
...NASA's fault.
Specifically, ICESat-2 shoots 10,000 laser pulses a second to measure ice, cloud and land elevation. These lasers aren't visible. Unless...there are very specific cloud conditions.
So if you see green lasers in the sky, it's probably just a NASA mapping satellite.
Probably.
The proposed launch of Starship has been delayed due to a frozen valve. We'll see how long it takes for them to try again.
What did launch yesterday was the JUICE spacecraft. This is an ESA mission that is particularly focused on Ganymede, but will also do flybys of Europa and Callisto. It will spend a year orbiting Ganymede and studying its magnetic field.
I am disappointed that I missed the livestream, though, which was apparently photobombed by a sloth.
A sloth.
He, of course, did not care about the rocket launch, and probably wasn't aware of how cute he is.
Two new studies indicate that it might actually have been...to browse on leaves. Not climb trees, but stand up in an open wood and grab a mouthful of tasty leaves.
While apes did love fruit, there were long periods of time with no fruit, i.e. the dry season.
In other words.
We stand upright because salad.
Answer: Something which violates the laws of physics as we know them.
I am stressing, of course, as we know them. When this happens, it means we don't know as much as we thought we did.
ULX's violate the Eddington limit, which determines how bright a cosmological object of a certain size can be. In theory, anything which violates that limit would explode.
The ULX they're looking at is a neutron star, and the theory is that the magnetic field of neutron stars holds them together even past that limit.
We're talking very strong magnetic fields here.
A museum is offering a 25k bounty on...a meteorite. It's somewhere in Washington County, Maine. So, if you are in that area and have some time and a car, might as well go hunting!
The fall was observed by radar, and it's the first to fall on Maine that we've been able to recall. The bounty is being offered by the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum, that would just love to put a bit of meteorite on display.
So...
So, one of the fun things we SF writers like to do is speculate about life on strange planets. Tidally locked planets are a particular favorite (I recommend Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night).
It appears that under certain circumstances, these planets could potentially flip. So, what would happen to any life on them?
What if it happened regularly? Would you end up with a situation like the one with Vinge's spiders, who can survive their planet freezing solid by hibernating?
There's some interesting story fuel there...
Apparently, some "smart" individual crushed up a whole black widow spider and injected it...with the goal of getting high. This was back in the 1990s, because of course it was.
Instead of getting high she (and this wasn't even a kid) ended up in the ICU for a few days on a ventilator because the venom gave her such bad muscle cramps she couldn't breathe.
And yes, there have also been stories of kids trying to get spiders, including black widows, to bite them to get superpowers.
Nope.
Spiders won't give you superpowers or get you high and please just leave the black widows alone to eat flies.
First of all, thank you Wired, not. I've had to explain to two separate groups of people this week that the Biobag, which is designed to replace NICU incubators, is not an artificial womb. (Nor fully tested in humans).
But in China, they used stem cells to create synthetic monkey embryos. The embryos were not viable and only survived for a week before disappearing (was this because they weren't viable or did the monkeys reabsorb?). They are saying their structures are not capable of full development and the purpose is to study early development without using naturally obtained embryos.
It might help us understand and prevent causes of early miscarriages.
But what if it's possible to create actual viable embryos from stem cells? This could resolve many fertility problems and, of course, let gay men have their own biological offspring with their partners. I fix this in my series...while no details are gone into, the gay couple with their own kid used a technique where their sperm was combined and then inserted into an egg donated by a woman, the sister of one of them, who then carried her own niece to term. That seems a more viable likely path to me, but if this did work, then you wouldn't need an egg donor.
You would still need to find a uterus somewhere, though.
A mangled lump of flesh and fur found by gold miners in the permafrost turned out to be an unfortunate Arctic ground squirrel, that apparently did not survive hibernation 30,000 years ago.
It looks just the same as the current ground squirrels, but it would be interesting to extract some DNA and do some comparisons to see if the species is static or if it has changed in interesting ways.
But the poor little thing.
Literally. A group of college students at Carnegie Mellon University have designed a shoebox-sized rover that will launch, along with a Chinese rover, on a private United Launch Services rocket. The lander will also contain MoonArk, a time capsule designed by the students as a message to future human civilizations.
Or perhaps to aliens.
Or...no, I don't have time to write a story about the crows finding it after we become extinct ;). But it's tempting.
Go kids!
An Earth-sized planet about 12 light years away is generating a repeating radio signal.
No, this is probably not somebody else's SETI beacon, but it still might be a sign of aliens. The signal is, in fact, coming from the interactions between YZ Ceti (the star) and YZ Ceti b (the planet).
It indicates that YZ Ceti b, which is about the size of Earth, has a strong magnetic field.
Which is required for a planet to be habitable.
Alas, while I'm not joking about the aliens, YZ Ceti b's proximity to its star means it is likely too warm for any kind of life we know about.
But it does have a magnetic field, which allows it to hold an atmosphere, which...
If we can find the same signal from a planet a bit further out, we may well have found aliens. Perhaps not the kind of aliens we can talk to, perhaps they won't be sapient or technological.
But life has to exist out there somewhere.
So, we now know who is going to orbit the moon. This is less exciting than landing, but it's still a big step.
The four crew members are:
Mission Commander: Reid Wiseman. Who resigned as Chief of NASA Astronauts to do this. He has experience on the ISS and also with undersea research. I'm also seeing his name as Gregory R. Wiseman, but NASA is using Reid, so I am assuming that is his preference.
Pilot: Victor Glover, a highly experienced test pilot. He became an astronaut by the classic route of flying for the military, as a naval aviator and then transferred to the air force to become a test pilot. He is the first Black man to work on the ISS.
Mission specialist: Christina Koch. A highly experienced astronaut who followed a very different path...she started out working in electrical engineering at Goddard. I think in this case they are using "mission specialist" to mean "flight engineer." Seems that she has the background.
Mission specialist: Jeremy Hansen, who will be representing Canada. He's another pilot type and also an astronaut trainer. It will be his first mission to space. Imagine that as your first mission. I suspect that he will be receiving pilot training from Glover and may be the emergency backup.
Seems like a decent team.
180 million light years away, something has exploded. It's called a Fast Blue Optical Transient (FBOT) or a "cow."
This one is weird, though. In space, explosions should be spherical. This one is flat. Flat.
No, it's not aliens. It's almost certainly a dense disk of dust that surrounded the star. But we live in hope, right?
There are aliens somewhere.
The crew announcement will be April 3 (Monday!) at 11am EDT (1500 GMT). I plan on watching!
Four astronauts will be chosen to travel further from Earth than humans have been in over 50 years. Artemis II will orbit the moon, during which systems will be tested. We may also get some cool pictures of the moon.
They will also be testing gravity maneuvers to save fuel on the return trip. The Earth is "downhill" compared to the moon and they hope to use that fact.
And they'll get to wear those cool new suits. Anyone else a bit jealous?
I mean, an exaggeration, but we all know how tough they are.
So, now we've made them change their mating territory. One of the ways you bait cockroaches is to use sugar, which cockroaches like. Male cockroaches also use sugar to court females. They actually secrete a sugary fluid to get females to mount them (Ladies on top if you're a cockroach) and then hook them in place.
However, liking sugar has become, well, not a survival trait. So more and more female cockroaches turn their mandibles up at it.
Which means that more and more male cockroaches have changed their formula so it tastes different. And it's all our fault.
Will this eventually mean that we'll have to change the bait formula too? Are we going to get into a chemical arms race with male cockroaches? Probably!
A. Seasons.
A year on Uranus is oh, about a human lifespan. 84 years.
And it's flipped on its side.
The pale area now being seen at Uranus' north pole is a "thickened photochemical haze" edged with storms. It's a giant cloud, in other words. A really, really big cloud. And it's probably normal for the time of year.
We just don't know what normal for any time of year is yet on Uranus. 84 years, people.
PBC J233.9-2343 was sending out jet material on either side...and it's 40 times the size of the Milky Way.
Was.
Now those jets are pointed directly at us. (Don't worry, it's 657 million light years away and it's not going to shoot us with anything).
Scientists are now trying to work out what could have turned a giant galaxy. The lead theory, of course, is a collision with another galaxy.
This happened a long time ago over a long time, basically we know because we can see the old jets that pointed in a different direction.
Maybe Q did it for a prank?
We're now pretty much 100% sure that 'Oumuamua was in fact a comet ejected from some other solar system.
Exposure to cosmic rays appears to have changed some of its ice into hydrogen gas, which was then released as it warmed up...and acted as a thruster.
It was just a regular, ordinary comet. And there have probably been others we just haven't noticed. Some of our system's comets may also end up getting ejected.
The interesting thing is that these comets could still potentially carry volatiles, including organic compounds, from system to system...
We have a major planetary alignment that will happen on March 28. This will be an alignment of Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Mars.
You will need binoculars or a telescope to catch the entire thing because Mercury and Uranus are on the faint side, but should be able to see the other three naked eye. They will form an arc, with Jupiter and Mercury at the horizon across to Mars near the moon.
So get out your telescope and go take a look at a reminder of how our solar system works.
You know, if your future planet has multiple space stations and such, some things to remember:
1. Those space stations are going to be visible. The ISS is not that big and it is naked eye visible if it passes over you and you know where to look. Spacedock? That's going to be VERY visible.
2. Your civilization had better have some kind of cleanup program for space trash, whether it's robots, human "space janitors," etc.
3. Most of your astronomy is going to be space based because of interference from orbital hardware.
4. In California, mysterious lights in the sky turned out to be trash dumped by the ISS, which was intended to burn up in the atmosphere. It did. People saw it. This would happen fairly frequently, probably accompanied by amusing speculation.
Think about all of these things.
NASA and Axiom Space have revealed the first new spacesuits to be worn by U.S. astronauts in forty years.
The suits are designed for lunar use and thus will be white...the demonstration model was concealed under a layer to hide certain proprietary features.
But they put a guy in the suit and he showed that he could do squats, lunges, and kneel in the suit. It's lighter, more form-fitting, and easier to move around in that past spacesuits. It's also going to be easier to don. The torso is rigid, but you step into the suit from behind. The arms and legs are modular, making it easier to fit the suit to different body types. Oh, and the helmet will contain a little video camera so that NASA can broadcast astronaut's eye views. The life support backpack will also contain a hydration system and some kind of nutrition system, allowing astronauts to stay out a little longer in comfort.
It looks a lot more like various suit designs from science fiction, and that's no accident; the cover layer was designed by Esther Marquis, a costume designer who has worked on SF series such as For All Mankind. The actual suits will be white for temperature control.
Today, stars top out at about 100 times the mass of the sun. (Yes, the sun is a small star; it is in fact considered a dwarf star).
But the very first stars? Some of them were over 10,000 times the size of the sun. Imagine that! They were also made of much lighter elements and did not live very long. These giant firecrackers burned out in about a million years or even less, and then could not form again.
But they created the matter that makes us. So I suppose I should call a toast to them.
We are star stuff.
We used to think of bees as superorganisms. The queen did all the thinking and the workers just followed pheromonic orders.
This is how we got the bugs in Starship Troopers.
Now things are more nuanced. Some species of bees commit regicide...intentionally killing a queen who isn't laying healthy enough eggs and replacing her.
It's become more and more clear that a bee hive is really run by the workers (I use this when doing a deep dive into verr culture, although the verr are more like naked molerats than bees).
And now we have evidence of social learning. Social learning is when an animal learns by watching somebody else do it. If you watch a YouTube tutorial, you are intentionally engaging in social learning. Dogs and horses can both learn by watching a more experienced animal perform.
Bees do it too. For example, if you teach a bumblebee to solve a simple puzzle (with a food reward) and then let another bumblebee watch, the second bumblebee will solve the puzzle much faster.
Honeybees seem to teach the waggle dance to younger workers.
If you have social learning, you have culture, because culture is the practices you learn by watching others.
So, bees have culture. Each hive may be slightly different in how they do things. Culture serves the purpose of increasing survival rates by varying behaviors and allowing for "memetic selection" - the ways which work best survive. Thankfully, unlike genes, social behaviors can be learned.
...because apparently water can just sit around in space.
Okay, not true. But they have found water in a protoplanetary disk. This indicates that the water on Earth may be older than our planet.
This will teach us something about how planets (and, of course, comets, which are snowballs) form. Comets are made up of leftover material, which might include water, that can then be deposited on the planets.
,,,including the ones on Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted some perfectly circular sand dunes on Mars. Okay, they're a little steeper on the south side, telling us which way the wind goes.
No, we don't know what quirk of local weather is making round dunes, but check this out.
https://scitechdaily.com/strange-circular-sand-dunes-discovered-on-mars-by-nasa-spacecraft/
It's pie day, so you'd better have pie. Any kind will do. Including pizza pie.
Pi Day was founded by a museum employee and physicist named Larry Shaw in San Francisco in 1988 and in addition to eating pie, you can do the pi day challenge...how many digits can you recite from memory?
I'm not even going to try, I'm a words person, not a numbers person.
But I definitely plan on pie.
There is a particularly fantastic piece of real estate for locating a radio telescope that's not that far away...in space terms.
It's the other side of the moon.
One of the biggest issues with Earth-based radio telescopes is interference from all the things on Earth which produce radio waves. Like, say, the break room microwave.
If you put it on the other side of the moon, then there's a lot of rock between it and all of those things. And in late 2025 we're going to try it.
It's called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) and will hopefully land on the far side of the moon and start to gather data we can't get through the normal interference...direct data on the early universe before stars existed. LuSEE-Night is a pathfinder mission, a proof of concept to demonstrate whether or not a farside observatory really will work.
I believe it will.
NASA will be assigning astronauts to Artemis II on Monday, April 3. They will be announcing the assignments in a live event on NASA Television at 11am EDT. The crew will be three astronauts from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency.
The prime assignment is, of course, Artemis III, but I am curious to see who they will pick.
Seriously?
And it may be a silver lining to two horrible diseases...tuberculosis and leprosy. A bacterium in that group can convert hydrogen into electricity. Mycobacterium smegmatis is what we call an extremophile, meaning it survives in environments that aren't hugely conducive to life. It's learned the trick to compensate for lack of nutrients.
Now we have taken its enzyme and may be able to use it to power certain very low power devices just from the air itself. This might include digital clocks and things like sensors. It could also be used in biological fuel cells to power your smartphone...or maybe your car...with just hydrogen as fuel.
But even just from the air it could be used to power small devices in inconvenient locations where changing or charging a battery is annoying. And sustainably.
