I was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch—April 12, 1961—I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.
Paul Allen
Now winter nights enlarge
This number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Thomas Campion
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
Sneaky New Bacteria on the ISS Could Build a Future on Mars | WIRED "What’s more interesting, maybe, is figuring out which bacteria are zeroes on Earth but heroes in the rarified, closed-loop environment of a spaceship. That’s why studying the International Space Station’s microbiome—the bacteria, fungi, and viruses that thrive on board—might be critical to the safety of missions to Mars, or permanent bases on other worlds."
Authors Guild Asks Members to Support PRO Act | Publishers Weekly "The act would enable freelance writers and authors to bargain collectively with businesses that hire them, something currently restricted by antitrust law. The Guild is also asking that the Senate amend the language of the bill to specifically cover the work of freelancers and authors."
How Bellingcat Unmasked Putin’s Assassins | The New Yorker "We are not exactly journalists, nor human-rights activists, nor computer scientists, nor archivists, nor academic researchers, nor criminal investigators, but at the nexus of all those disciplines."
Report on COVID origins highlights clues to animal-human jump | CIDRAP "The international team that traveled to Wuhan, China, to investigate the source of SARS-CoV-2 published its full findings today, which cover four possibilities, but the experts say a jump to humans from an intermediate animal carrier is the likeliest scenario based on promising clues."
The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope | The New Yorker "Just before eight in the morning on December 1st of last year, Ada Monzón was at the Guaynabo studios of WAPA, a television station in Puerto Rico, preparing to give a weather update, when she got a text from a friend, [who] had sent her a photo, taken from his sister-in-law’s back yard, of the brilliant blue Caribbean sky and the green, heavily forested limestone hills.... [T]he image was notable not for what it showed but for what was missing."
Neanderthal gene found to sharply reduce COVID-19 risk : The Asahi Shimbun "Researchers headed by Svante Paabo, a human evolutionary genomics professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University here, found that 30 percent of Japanese as well as roughly half the population of the Eurasian land mass today have the characteristic."
Cern experiment hints at new force of nature | Large Hadron Collider | The Guardian "In physics parlance, the result has a significance of 3.1 sigma, meaning the chance of it being a fluke is about one in 1,000. While that may sound convincing evidence, particle physicists tend not to claim a new discovery until a result reaches a significance of five sigma, where the chance of it being a statistical quirk are reduced to one in a few million."
Chasing the Elusive Numbers That Define Epidemics | Quanta Magazine "Variables in epidemiological models aren’t usually well known to the general public, but one has had a genuine movie star moment. 'What we need to determine is this,” says a scientist played by Kate Winslet in the film Contagion. “For every person who gets sick, how many other people are they likely to infect?'"
But there are other things to consider...
The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy | WIRED "As the lawyer saw it, he had two options: He could hire a professional negotiator and risk angering the companies he hoped would acquire his tiny venture, or he could set up an auction. Hinton chose an auction. In the end, four names joined the bidding: Baidu, Google, Microsoft, and a two-year-old London startup called DeepMind, cofounded by a young neuroscientist named Demis Hassabis, that most of the world had never heard of."
China plans to build research station on moon's south pole: chief designer | Xinhua "China has completed feasibility studies of the fourth phase of its lunar exploration program and is expected to build an international lunar research station on the moon's south pole in the future, said Wu Weiren, the chief designer of China's lunar exploration program."
A Massive Global Hunt for Variants Is Under Way | The Atlantic "Since then, the number of sequenced genomes has simply exploded, to 700,000. In just over a year, the virus that causes COVID-19 has become the most sequenced virus of all time—soaring past such longtime contenders as HIV and influenza."
'Oumumamua and the search for life in the universe | Astronomy "'Oumuamua, faint though it is, can be a beacon to us. It can show us a way to do better and search harder. Not because we think it is likely to be an alien spaceship but because, dammit, if there are alien ships out there — or alien whales or trees or microbes, for that matter — we want to know."
How to Understand COVID-19 Variants and Their Effects on Vaccines | Quanta Magazine "Viruses evolve. It’s what they do. That’s especially true for a pandemic virus like SARS-CoV-2, the one behind COVID-19. When a population lacks immunity and transmission is extensive, we expect viral mutations to appear frequently simply due to the number of viruses replicating in a short period of time."
When the Grid Goes Down, Can a Fleet of Batteries Replace It? | WIRED "When the power was on, he charged up his 2011 Nissan Leaf, parked outside under a layer of snow. Then, when the lights went out again, he connected his car to an inverter, pushing electrons out of its 24-kilowatt-hour battery and into other things that were, at the time, more essential: lights, a space heater, an electric blanket, and his Wi-Fi router."
Decades-Long Quest Reveals Details of the Proton’s Inner Antimatter | Quanta Magazine "...the proton’s interior swirls with a fluctuating number of six kinds of quarks, their oppositely charged antimatter counterparts (antiquarks), and 'gluon' particles that bind the others together, morph into them and readily multiply. Somehow, the roiling maelstrom winds up perfectly stable and superficially simple..."
How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology | The Atlantic "Lichens are alluring targets for 'bioprospectors,' who scour nature for substances that might be medically useful to us. And new basidiomycetes are part of an entirely new group, separated from their closest known relatives by 200 million years. All kinds of beneficial chemicals might lie within their cells."
Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others? | The New Yorker "...there was a peculiarity in the data: in more than forty per cent of pre-pandemic samples, the researchers found evidence that the new coronavirus was somehow triggering a T-cell response. These T cells were acting as if they’d recognized a virus they had assuredly never before encountered."
Jeff Bezos renews focus on Blue Origin, which has been slower to launch | The Denver Post "During his tour with reporters in 2016, Bezos pointed to an image in the headquarters’ central area. It showed two tortoises holding an hourglass and gazing upward toward the cosmos. Below was Blue Origin’s motto: Gradatim ferociter, which is Latin for 'step by step, ferociously.'"
China's Tianwen-1 probe performs orbital adjustment around Mars | CGTN "The lander carrying the rover is expected to land on Mars in May or June. Chinese space engineers and scientists have chosen a relatively flat region in the southern part of Utopia Planitia, a large plain, as a potential landing zone. The rover will be released after landing to conduct scientific exploration."
Are Mars's Volcanoes Still Active? | The Atlantic "Kedar’s group analyzed five mysterious seismic events. Two featured a strong polarization signal that allowed them to be traced to Cerberus Fossae with a high degree of confidence. These two appear to be run-of-the-mill quakes."
Could Climate Change Be More Extreme Than We Think? | The Atlantic "Taking in the whole sweep of Earth’s history, now we see how unnatural, nightmarish, and profound our current experiment on the planet really is. A small population of our particular species of primate has, in only a few decades, unlocked a massive reservoir of old carbon slumbering in the Earth, gathering since the dawn of life..."