Remember Balto?

 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?

Remember the first black hole photo?

 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!

No, We're Not All Going To Die

 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).

Smile, Deimos!

 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.

https://www.space.com/mars-moon-deimos-image-origin-story

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

 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.

So, what about that carbon negative...concrete

 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/

Not Aliens. Or Ray Guns

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.

Starship Fails, JUICE Launches

 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.

Why did apes start standing upright?

 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.

What is an Ultraluminous X-Ray Source?

 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.

In Maine and have a car?

 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...

A bit of writer fuel

 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...

This is not going to turn you into a superhero...

 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.

Artificial Reproduction and Synthetic Embryos

 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.

Poor 30,000 Year Old Squirrel

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.

Those Robotics Kids Are Shooting For...the Moon

 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!

This Time, I'm Not Joking About the Aliens

 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.

Artemis Astronauts Announced!

 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.