It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.
Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales
Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Neil Armstrong
Red dwarf starlight used to grow photosynthesizing bacteria | Astronomy "...at least as far as the spectrum of light is concerned, red dwarfs have the capability to host photosynthetic life forms. In turn, this hints at the kind of biosignature these lifeforms might present to distant observers, such as ourselves."
Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens? | The New Yorker "It’s often said that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.' The phrase was popularized by the astronomer Carl Sagan, who probably did as much as any scientist has done to promote the search for extraterrestrial life. By what’s sometimes referred to as the 'Sagan standard,' Loeb’s claim clearly falls short..."
A Sci-Fi Dreamer’s Poisoning Death Shocks China "Mr. Lin was poisoned in December, according to the police in Shanghai and accounts from state-run media, and he died on Christmas Day. His death has rattled China’s technology and gaming worlds and set off furious speculation about who killed him and why."
Astronomers Get Their Wish, and a Cosmic Crisis Gets Worse | Quanta Magazine "...we should see galaxies flying away from us 67 kilometers per second faster for each additional megaparsec of distance. Yet actual measurements consistently overshoot the mark. Galaxies are receding too quickly. The discrepancy thrillingly suggests that some unknown quickening agent may be afoot in the cosmos."
What happens to the Space Force after Trump? | Los Angeles Times "Created last year as the first new armed service since 1947, it was established with the mission of protecting U.S. interests in space from potential adversaries, be they rival nations or gobs of space junk."
The Skeletons at the Lake | The New Yorker "In the winter of 1942, on the shores of a lake high in the Himalayas, a forest ranger came across hundreds of bones and skulls, some with flesh still on them. When the snow and ice melted that summer, many more were visible through the clear water, lying on the bottom."
Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen | ArsTechnica "A new study led by Pralay Gayen at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, tests a device that could tap a different resource—perchlorate brine believed to exist in the Martian ground at some locations. The device can split the water in that brine, producing pure oxygen and hydrogen."
A Quest to Discover America’s First Science-Fiction Writer | The New Yorker "'WILEY & HALSTED, No. 3 Wall street, have just received SYMZONIA, or a voyage to the internal world, by capt. Adam Seaborn. Price $1.' As literary landmarks go, it’s not quite Emerson greeting Whitman at the start of a great career. But this humble advert may herald the first American science-fiction novel. "
Fake Faces | The New York Times "There are now businesses that sell fake people. On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000. If you just need a couple of fake people — for characters in a video game, or to make your company website appear more diverse — you can get their photos for free on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com."
A Solar-Powered Rocket Might Be Our Ticket to Interstellar Space | WIRED "Only two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have left our solar system. But that was a scientific bonus after they completed their main mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Neither spacecraft was equipped with the right instruments to study the boundary between our star’s planetary fiefdom and the rest of the universe."
Disney Won't Pay Star Wars Royalties Says Alan Dean Foster "SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal also shared her own letter in the press release, saying that the organization chose to go public with the accusations because the situation is unprecedented—not just because it’s impacting a prolific sci-fi writer with decades of experience in the industry who helped form Star Wars’ literary voice, but because SFWA is worried this problem could happen to other writers in the future."
Is space mining the eco-friendly choice? | Astronomy "'...Jeff Bezos breezily suggested that we “don’t want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth..... Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial.'"
Debate Erupts Over How ‘Forbidden’ Black Holes Grow | Quanta Magazine "...on May 21, 2019, midsize black holes were unambiguously detected for the first time when the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European counterpart Virgo captured the tremor from a pair of black holes merging in the depths of space."
State of Surveillance | ChinaFile "Whether they are assessing residents’ basic needs or trying to predict future behavior, officials engaged in surveillance are pursuing a single goal: to keep China’s citizens under near-constant watch."
1984.
The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End | Quanta Magazine "In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago."
What Comes After the International Space Station? | WIRED "In 50 years, Suffredini hopes, the company will have a large rotating space station complete with parks, schools, and shopping centers to host not just professional astronauts but also their families. He envisions a spinning station that creates artificial gravity in the outer ring with a non-spinning hub in the center used for microgravity research."
Cue the theme ffrom 2001.
Tiny moon shadows may harbor hidden stores of ice | Phys.org "[T]he researchers estimate that the moon could harbor roughly 15,000 square miles of permanent shadows in various shapes and sizes—reservoirs that, according to theory, might also be capable of preserving water via ice."
Who puts the right into "The Right Stuff"? | Astronomy.com "I like The Right Stuff movie, like it a lot. But the thing I like about this new treatment of [the material from the book] is that it goes into much greater depth character-wise. That's something a series allows that a movie does not. You have 3 hours of movie to build these characters. With the series, you can really dive into just who they were."
Disney+
A New Map of All the Particles and Forces |Quanta Magazine "Chris Quigg, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been thinking about how to visualize the Standard Model for decades, hoping that a more powerful visual representation would help familiarize people with the known particles of nature and prompt them to think about how these particles might fit into a larger, more complete theoretical framework."
The genius of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen | The Spectator "Modern Two in Edinburgh reopens this week, and what more fitting subject for a show in a time of global catastrophe than Ray Harryhausen, titan of cinema, creator of beasts, destroyer of cities, king of adventure?"
How Luna 3 first unveiled the Moon’s farside | Astronomy.com "What happened to create these two quite dissimilar lunar faces? Current thinking postulates that a Mars-sized impactor, named Theia, hit Earth in a glancing blow around 4.5 billion years ago .... As its Earth-facing nearside broiled for millions of years under the extreme heat radiated by our infant planet, the farside cooled, and a temperature gradient steadily evolved between the two lunar hemispheres."