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.
The review of Artemis I has shown "no issues" that would delay the planned launch of Artemis 2. There was a minor issue with the heat shield, but it would not have caused safety issues. (Obviously, they're analyzing to see if a small redesign would help).
There was also a minor issue with the power system in the service module, which could be monitored by the astronauts.
The biggest damage remains that to the elevators on the mobile launcher. One has now been fixed.
So, Artemis 2 will likely go off more or less when scheduled and we can probably expect to see an announcement about who's going soon enough.
The DART mission altered the orbit of Dimorphos' by 32 minutes. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but was more than scientists expected.
This means that we can theoretically do this! We can divert an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth. This is worth spending money on...and working internationally on (as the U.S. might not be the best place to launch from).
Planetary defense is GO.
Apparently, this 77 year old guy believes that you can bend time with a spinning laser loop and an artificial black hole. Sounds a bit like the vortex.
Light can create gravity and thus influence time: That seems reasonable.
However, he hasn't created time travel. There is some possibility he may have made a very small scale time loop, though...allowing travel back only to when the loop was created. He thinks we might be able to use this to predict earthquakes.
We've all seen all of those movies and TV shows, though. Time loops bad!
Scientists discovered an adorable little yellow throated hummingbird and thought it was a new species.
Turned out it was a hybrid between the Pink-Throated Brilliant Hummingbird and the Rufous-Webbed Brilliant Hummingbird.
Unlike mammals, birds do not suffer fertility problems when they hybridize (not all mammals do either, but...) It appears that there are multiple generations of these hybrids.
Hybrid, new species, or could it possibly be both?
...and it may also be how life started in the first place.
Scientists messing around with recreating the primordial soup discovered that natural selection determined the 20 specific amino acids that life relies on. Organic compounds integrated with the amino acids they "needed."
Or do we need to redefine life? If so, then life is everywhere, throughout the universe, on and in asteroids, certainly on moons like Titan. If it evolves through natural selection, what is it if not life?
I actually find this...hopeful.
(it wasn't all that good).
No, let's not use human brain cells to make computers. And don't call it "organoid intelligence." Please.
Why do people think this could possibly be a good idea? The ethics and the potential unintended consequences bother me.
How about putting effort into quantum computing instead?
