...New Horizons’ performance so far suggests it is ready for the challenge, Stern said. Measurements taken Saturday showed that the spacecraft was within 20 miles of its intended flyby distance from Ultima Thule and that the timing of the encounter will be within 2 seconds of what was expected.
“We’re rendezvousing with something that’s a mountain draped in black velvet in almost pitch-dark conditions, and we’re screaming up to it . . . within 2 seconds of perfection,” Stern said. “You can’t get any better than that.”
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
"Tu-whit, to-who!"—
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
It may be the holidays but winter, too, is upon us.
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
Oumuamua is a comet, neither an alien space ship nor an asteroid.
“We think this is a tiny, weird comet,” said lead author Marco Micheli, from the European Space Agency (ESO), in a press release. “We can see in the data that its boost is getting smaller the farther away it travels from the Sun, which is typical for comets.”
Publisher, Author Groups Protest Library Book Scanning Program "This week the National Writers Union became the latest organization to join the outcry over a practice known as “controlled digital lending” (CDL), by which a library (or a nonprofit, like the Internet Archive) scans a print copy of a book they have legally acquired, then makes the scan available to be borrowed in lieu of the print book, using a DRM-protected one user/one copy model, and, crucially, taking the corresponding print book out of circulation while the digital copy is on loan."
Paperback pioneer Betty Ballantine dead at 99 "Charging as little as a quarter, they published everything from reprints of Mark Twain novels to paperbacks of contemporary best-sellers. They helped established the paperback market for science fiction, Westerns and other genres, releasing original works and reprints by J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke and H.P. Lovecraft, among others."
Mysterious Quantum Rule Reconstructed From Scratch “'We derive all the properties of measurements in quantum theory: what the questions are, what the answers are, and what the probability of answers occurring are,' Masanes said."
The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami "I think if you’re a fiction writer and you’re too intelligent, you cannot write. But if you’re stupid, you cannot write. You have to find a position in between. That is very difficult."
Harvard’s top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us — and he doesn’t care what his colleagues think "Loeb argues that ‘Oumuamua’s behavior means it can’t be, as is commonly imagined, a clump of rock shaped like a long potato, but rather an object that’s very long and no more than 1 millimeter thick, perhaps like a kilometer-long obloid pancake — or a ship sail — so light and thin that sunlight is pushing it out of our solar system."
We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it "Gum disease is far more common than Alzheimer’s. But 'Alzheimer’s strikes people who accumulate gingipains and damage in the brain fast enough to develop symptoms during their lifetimes,' she says. 'We believe this is a universal hypothesis of pathogenesis.'”
Slooh: Lunar Eclipse "The first, and only, total lunar eclipse of 2019 will be visible from just a portion of the globe." In case you like being warm indoors, a livestream.
This Russian startup wants to put billboards in space. Astronomers aren’t impressed | Astronomy.com "—you’ve just fled from the city to your nearest national park to gaze deeply into the infinite abyss of space and contemplate how your own existence fits into the curtain of the universe. Then, out of the corner of your eye, you see bright white letters spelling “KFC” spring across the horizon in a long arch—"
Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps? "The primary characteristic of the deepest reaches of the past, especially for the sort of observer whose paramount concerns are those of the present, is the accommodating silence found there. The quieter an epoch on its own terms, the more loudly it can be made to speak, in the way of a ventriloquist’s dummy, for ours."
How Nearby Stellar Explosions Could Have Killed Off Large Animals "Even though Earth is floating in the void, it does not exist in a vacuum. The planet is constantly bombarded by stuff from space, including a daily deluge of micrometeorites and a shower of radiation from the sun and more-distant stars. Sometimes, things from space can maim or kill us—"
What's the maximum gravity we could survive? | Astronomy.com "Now, in a paper published on the pre-print server arXiv, three physicists, claim that the maximum gravitational field humans could survive long-term is four-and-a-half times the gravity on Earth."
Astronomer Avi Loeb on the Interstellar Body 'Oumuamua - SPIEGEL ONLINE Questioner: "The historical event here on Earth which probably comes closest to the arrival of aliens was the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. For the peoples living there, that event turned out to be a catastrophe."
Must Writers Be Moral? Their Contracts May Require It "One writer who did [read and object] was the fantasy and science-fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who died last year. When she discovered the morality clause in her HarperCollins contract in 2011, she posted on her blog a satirical letter from a fictional writer confessing sins to Rupert Murdoch, who owns the company: “It was nothing really materially damaging, only just the money and I.D. I stole from the old man with the walker...."
How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code "Preskill thinks the language of quantum error correction will ultimately carry over to actual space-time. 'It’s really entanglement which is holding the space together,” he said. “If you want to weave space-time together out of little pieces, you have to entangle them in the right way. And the right way is to build a quantum error-correcting code.'"
NASA Hits Its New Year’s Target at the Edge of the Solar System "Scientists hope their observations of Ultima Thule will provide new information about the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Objects in the Kuiper Belt are cosmic leftovers, remnants of a tumultuous process that swept some debris into planets and scattered the rest."
Elon Musk’s Boring Co. is unveiling its tunnel... “'This is the most exciting thing that’s happened here in a long time.... Nobody else is digging tunnels and building rockets in the same place.'”
What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life "Neither animal, plant, fungus nor familiar protozoan, a strange microbe that sits in its own ‘supra-kingdom’ of life foretells incredible biodiversity yet to be discovered by new sequencing technologies."
The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day "—15. This could easily happen again. Last year, the world learned that a group of scientists had resurrected a virus called horsepox. Several researchers and ethicists criticized that work, arguing that it would make it easier for others to recreate the related (and far more dangerous) smallpox virus."
Mathematical Simplicity May Drive Evolution’s Speed "Genetic algorithms, optimization methods that have been popular for decades, use the principles of natural selection to engineer new designs (for robots, drugs and transportation systems, among other things), train neural networks, or encrypt and decrypt data."
How Automation is Changing Work "If you were beginning a career in computer programming in 2007, there were good times ahead.... August’s issue of Business Week magazine.... predicted that the career most likely to suffer from job losses in the United States was … computer programmer." Changing times.
Locals Kill One of Elon Musk's plans "Elon Musk’s Boring Company has abandoned its plan to dig a tunnel under the west side of Los Angeles after it and the city settled a lawsuit brought by two area neighborhood groups who opposed the scheme."