Time on the moon

So, here's a thought:

What's the time, right now, on the moon?

This isn't a trivial question. With increased lunar exploration and potentially settlement, we're going to need GPS satellites for the moon at some point. GPS requires really good clocks.

Which means...

...everyone needs to agree what the time is on the moon.

The Apollo missions, of course, ran on  Houston time. But if we have a NASA mission, a SpaceX mission, a Chinese mission, a Japanese mission...all talking to each other? It would be temporal chaos.

So, we need to agree on a time framework for the moon. Complicating the fact is that time does not flow at quite the same speed on the moon, because gravity is lower. This isn't anything you would notice, but clocks on the moon run about 56 microseconds faster than those on Earth. Oh, and clocks on the moon don't sync with clocks in orbit either. All of this has to be taken into account.

The lunar day is 29.5 days long, so probably won't be used as a basis for the lunar clock. This results in the complication of having two days on the moon: The natural lunar day, and the Earth day. Science fiction authors never think of that.

What will we call each day?

All of these are questions we need to answer. Will the moon have its own singular timezone, which makes sense given the astronauts' day won't be the lunar day?

Time on the moon. It's not that easy...

Brain the size of a planet, itty bitty...star?

 Exoplanet TOI-5205b. It's a gas giant the same size as Jupiter, or thereabouts.

It orbits the red dwarf TOI-5205.

Except there's a problem. It orbits at a 4 day closeness and it is only a quarter the size of the star.

By the way, this can't happen.

Per our models, the itty bitty red star can't possibly have given off enough gas to form something the size of Jupiter, or even a gas giant at all.

So, are our models wrong?

Or is something else going on? Maybe the planet was captured? It seems awfully close for that, though.

More likely we have something wrong in the math somewhere.

The spore drive...

 ...is ridiculous, but what about a flak jacket made of mushrooms?

It turns out that certain fungi produce material that is as good as plastic. Specifically, the Hoof mushroom, so called because it looks like a horse's hoof.

Possible applications include implants, sports equipment, electronics, surface coatings for windshields and, yes, body armor.

Made out of shrooms.

Biomimicry is an awesome thing.

China's Mars Rover is probably dead.

 It hasn't moved in months. It hasn't sent updates.

Looks very much like it died, probably due to dust on solar panels, and the Chinese are too embarrassed to admit it.

This is an unfortunate loss, it was doing some decent science.

Desert microbiomes and Mars

 The Atacama Desert in Chile. It's the closest you'll get to Mars without hopping into a rocketship.

And it has all kinds of interesting microbes. And 9% of the genetic fragments found belonged to species unknown to science. So far unknown to science that we can't identify their relatives.

Not only that, but these fragments could not be detected by certain sensors.

Namely...the ones we have sent to Mars.

Meaning that we may be missing signs of life on Mars because we sent the wrong sensors. Or because we haven't yet miniaturized the ones needed. If so, then we have to be careful with that sample return mission...

...because there may well be life or fossils on Mars, we just can't see them. Yet.

Uh oh...

 I'm a little disturbed by the fact that we may have a supermassive black hole, which normally exist as galactic anchors, just wandering through space.

It's leaving behind it a trail of newborn stars and excited gases.

Probably two galaxies collided and it got ejected. If that's what it is.

I keep thinking of the anomaly from Discovery Season Four, though...

Hair...

 It's one of our stranger features. No hair on our bodies, lots on our heads. No other animal, including our close relatives has this pattern.

And it varies a lot in texture.

So, why do we have hair? Turns out it's to keep our advanced brains cool.

And it turns out the most efficient design for cooling is 4C. Yeah, we now know for sure what many have long theorized...Black people have curly hair as a means of temperature regulation.

https://www.iflscience.com/we-might-finally-know-why-curly-hair-exists-67605

Well, it's still needing more work, but it makes a lot of sense. I would also want to see if straight white hair reduces heat loss from the cranium...i.e., did we go back to having straight hair when we left the tropics.

(Also, it may be a Neanderthal trait).

Did dinosaurs get the flu?

 We may never know, but they certainly got sick.

One specimen had advanced, metastasized bone cancer that was probably terminal, although the poor thing, a smaller cousin to the triceratops, died in a flash flood.

Another dinosaur was diagnosed with septic arthritis, which happens when a joint gets infected. This was after ruling out gout and tuberculosis.

A number of T-Rex jaws have sets of smooth-edged lesions. We thought they came from fights, but they look a lot like trichomonosis. This is known today as avian canker, and affects a variaty of modern birds. It can range from asymptomatic to lethal (the lesions block the esophagus or the trachea).

And back to did dinosaurs get the flu? A diplodpocid sauropod specimen was found with a growth on a vertebrae that had fossilized and looked like a broccoli floret. Turns out this was right where the air sacs attach...and the dinosaur was diagnosed with airsacculitis, which is inflammation of the air sacs, which, yes, again is common in modern birds. Alas, not the flu...most likely a bacterial or fungal infection.

So, we don't know if dinosaurs got the flu. But it's very likely they got something that made them cough.

Gotta feel sorry for the sick dinos!

350 pound penguin?

Apparently, such a beastie once existed. It makes sense that penguins, which spend much of their time in buoyant water, might grow big. But this weighed more than an ostrich. Named Kumimamu fordycel, it was found on New Zealand's South Island. Oh, and this is more than three times the typical weight of an Emperor penguin.

The penguin was also taller than a man, albeit not by that much.

So, why don't we have giant penguins now? The giant penguin thrived in the late Paleocene era, only 5 to 10 million years after the destruction of the dinosaurs.

What happened after that time?

Cetaceans happened. Likely the giant penguins could not compete, in the end, with dolphins. Mammals have the advantage of not having to come ashore to breed, after all.

Or we'd probably still have giant penguins around in the antarctic today. Probably wouldn't want to mess with one...

Like Something Out of the Expanse

 NASA is using AI to design hardware for space. Check this out:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/nasa-parts-designed-by-ai-look-like-bones-left-by-some-alien-species/

It really looks like the protomolecule made it.

Practically, AI assist is helping them design parts that weigh less and tolerate higher structural load. This is supervised AI, I would note, not replacing human designers but helping them.

Looking at that changes the entire aesthetic for future ships, doesn't it...

(I really don't want to change anything, but...)

The Problem With Hydrogen

 Hydrogen fuel cells are nice for the environment. The only waste they produce is water.

So, why aren't they environmentally friendly?

Because you have to make the hydrogen from water in the first place. Fresh water is a very valuable resource.

Thankfully, scientists have now come up with a catalyst that might allow us to generate hydrogen from seawater, which is obviously much more plentiful. Traditional methods generated chlorine, which is bad. This doesn't. (Some chlorine is not bad because we use it for stuff, but this was making way too much).

Yes, they are UFOs...

 ...no, they are most likely not aliens. I'm talking about the weird objects that the U.S. military keeps shooting down.

They are unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial objects until we know what they are. Yes, I am a pedant about this because it drives me nuts.

If we did know they were aliens, they would not be UFOs.

I think they are more likely part of some kind of experiment...

Mmm....crab.

 Like crab? So did Neanderthals. In a seafront cave in Portugal we found 90,000 year old evidence of...crab feasts.

They appear to have been particularly fond of the brown crab, which I've never had, but is apparently still popular in that area. They even broke the shells open in the same way, although their crab mallets were probably stone. Oh, and they roasted them on hot coals.

They also appear to have eaten limpets, mussels, and clams. Mmm....seafood.

A new neighbor?

We just found a potentially habitable, Earth-sized planet...and it's "only" 72 light years away.

In cosmic terms, that's next door.

The planet circles an M dwarf star. Unfortunately, it's very close to the star and while it does have an atmosphere, it's certainly tidally locked.

So, probably not of much use to us, but an atmosphere makes it interesting anyway... 

We've Seen This Movie...

 ...and it wasn't very good.

A bit ago we found a movie called Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators. It was about weregators. It was terrible.

Now scientists are...hybridizing gators and catfish. Ragin' Cajun Catfish Gators? If it works, by the time we've finished...because the goal for the catfish is our plates.

They're infusing catfish with alligator DNA to make them more resistant to disease and also made them less likely to reproduce (to reduce the risk of it spreading).

But we know how this is going to end, and it isn't with delicious cajun catfish...

Ice floats...

 ...because when water becomes a solid, unlike many substances, it becomes less dense. This is because water crystallizes, and ice has a lot of gaps in it.

But it's now possible to create amorphous ice, where the molecules are disorganized. Surprise surprise, it's not less dense.

How?

By making it very, very cold indeed. Earth never gets that cold, so water has the energy to form crystals. In deep space? Water actually solidifies instead of crystallizing. It ends up looking like a fine white powder and when you warm it up, it recrystalizes, producing remarkable amounts of heat.

This is probably what causes icequakes on ice worlds like Ganymede and Europa. And it's the true solid form of water...all the other kinds of ice are affected by something.

Here's some more details.

1.2 million years ago...

 ...somebody was making hand axes at Melka Kunture, in Ethiopia's Awash River Valley. These are half a million years older than the previous oldest obsidian tools...

...and it was a factory.

575 hand axes made in a standardized way in a dedicated area, and that's more than a community would have used. This, ladies, gentlemen and beautiful others is evidence of specialization, trade, and perhaps even what we might call civilization.

And by the way? Whoever these people were, they were not Homo sapiens. Our species didn't evolve until much later.

Trade and organized tool making predates our evolution into our current form (Some would argue final, but I have never quite bought that).

Phewf!

Did life on Earth begin out there?

 It's looking more and more likely...sort of. In fact, what might well have happened is that amino acids formed in deep space and were carried here by meteorites.

All four of the base amino acids that form DNA and RNA have now been found raw in meteorites, but they could also have formed on Earth.

However, if these amino acids form in space, it makes it more likely that different ecosystems will be biologically compatible...that is that DNA or some form of it may be a universal or near-universal coding system for life.

We'll see.