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
Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains | Science | AAAS "Finding the streptococci on the teeth of both ancient humans and Neanderthals also suggests they inherited these microbes from their common ancestor, who lived more than 600,000 years ago."
Pushing cooking, and control of fire, back a considerable ways.
Sci-Fi About Overpopulation Was Way Off | Wired "Dystopian scenarios may make for exciting stories, but often their predictions are so dire that they inspire hopelessness rather than resolve. “I think that there is a view that if something is bad, if it’s a real problem, that the best thing to do is state the problem in the bleakest possible terms, because that will motivate people to go take action,” Yglesias says. “I don’t think that that’s right as a theory of human motivation..."
Elon Musk's Starship Could Land America Back on the Moon | The Atlantic "....Take this path all the way to Boca Chica, past the solar-panel farms and storage sheds, past the little street that used to be called Joanna Street until Musk renamed it Rocket Road, and you end up on the beach, with sky and sea stretching out before you. It’s a beautiful view on any day, and maybe, one day, it’ll be someone’s last look at Earth."
Elon Musk’s ‘SNL’ Trap | The Atlantic "Musk has become arguably one of the most successful trolls on Twitter today, a public figure without any stake in entertainment or politics capable of provoking a reaction, full stop. This hosting gig—unconventional for SNL, but entirely unnecessary for him—is a trap.... It doesn’t matter whether you react positively or negatively; you’ve already been caught reacting."
How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously | The New Yorker "The government may or may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma. But, in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo. For many, this has been a comfort."
New York Returns Its Police ‘Robodog’ After a Public Outcry | WIRED "In February, the NYPD used Spot to defuse a hostage situation in the Bronx. When video of the device went viral, its flexible legs and camera-for-a-head design spooked people. The robot is quadrupedal but doesn’t actually look like a dog. A more immediate comparison is the armed robots featured in a postapocalyptic episode of Black Mirror."
Writers Orgs Form #DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force | Publishers Weekly "Half a dozen professional writers’ organizations have joined with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in forming a joint task to press the Walt Disney Company to ensure it pays all royalties owed to authors."
NASA’s bold bet on Starship for the Moon may change spaceflight forever | Ars Technica "With Starship, SpaceX has offered what appears to be the best technical solution to NASA's stated goal of a sustainable lunar exploration program. Starship would be able to take far more people and cargo to the Moon than any other solution for NASA—and it could do the job for far less money and far more often."
NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Flies on Mars | The Atlantic "For the first time in history, humankind has taken flight on another planet. Millions of miles from Earth, on an alien world with a wisp-thin atmosphere, a tiny helicopter rose into the air, hovered for 39 seconds, and then gently touched back down on the surface of Mars."
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."