“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Ready for summer in the light; enduring winter in the shade.
...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.
The Race to Develop the Moon | The New Yorker "Mahoney pointed out an engine without its casing, next to a small computer. “Some of these rocket models are literally operated by Raspberry Pi,” he said."
Gamma Ray Data Reveal Surprises About the Sun | Quanta Magazine "A decade’s worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent."
Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art - The Ringer "The obituaries are appropriately admiring. But there’s an undertone in some of them similar to the undertone that sometimes creeps into reviews of his books. His books are so singular, so challenging, and so out of sync with any conceivable mainstream that critics sometimes seem to be asking 'What kind of great book is this?'"
What’s Known About the SpaceX Crew Dragon Accident "One source indicated that the company has a lot of data about the failure—this was a ground-based test, so the vehicle was heavily instrumented—so theoretically finding the root cause of the accident should be more straightforward than had a problem occurred during a real flight."
Missives from Another World: Literature of Parallel Universes - The Millions "In the 19th century, the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne did something simila.... His overlooked “P.’s Correspondence” from his 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse is credibly the first alternate history story written in English. "
Heat-Loving Microbes, Once Dormant, Thrive Over Decades-Old Fire "The coal-seam fire at Centralia provides researchers with the perfect opportunity to test a new idea known as a microbial seed bank: that commonly overlooked dormant individuals make up a vast reservoir of biodiversity, ready to spring to life when environmental conditions change."
Viruses Have a Secret, Altruistic Social Life "...until recently, no one had considered that simple viruses, too, have social lives that influence their fitness and their evolution."
Your smartphone is light years ahead of NASA computers that guided Apollo moon landings "...10 pounds of that weight likely was the memory on the computers, composed of iron rings with wires passing through them and wrapped around them. Called rope core memory, it was limited to just 2 kilobytes of memory that could be erased and rewritten, known today as random access memory, or RAM."
Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox on Us All "So two years ago, in a Hail Mary attempt to defend against potential bioengineered viruses, Evans and his research associate did something unthinkable: They revived an extinct cousin of smallpox called horsepox, using mail-order DNA."
The Flat-Heeled Muse "The muse in charge of fantasy wears good, sensible shoes. No foam-born Aphrodite, she vaguely resembles my old piano teacher, who was keen on metronomes."
The Day the Dinosaurs Died "If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour.
Why Trump Wants to Go to the Moon So Badly "There’s some disagreement about what the last people to visit the moon said just before they left.... Or it could be, as astronaut lore has it, a few colorful words from Cernan: 'Let’s get outta this mutha.'"
Artificial-intelligence pioneers win $1 million Turing Award "The trio’s efforts to popularize algorithms that extract patterns in data was initially met with skepticism, the association noted, but their commitment to artificial-intelligence research has led to breakthroughs in many areas of computer science, including speech recognition, robotics and the ways in which machines interpret digital images and videos."
The human brain never stops growing neurons, a new study claims | PBS NewsHour "If the memory center of the human brain can grow new cells, it might help people recover from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), delay the onset of Alzheimer’s, deepen our understanding of epilepsy and offer new insights into memory and learning."
How China is using science fiction to sell Beijing’s vision of the future "The plot... neatly encapsulates the government’s vision: China’s present is only prologue to its future technological dominance. That technological dominance is an unquestionable good, saving the earth and its people from imminent destruction."
NASA's Supersize Space Launch System Might Be Doomed "On Wednesday morning, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.... revealed an unexpected twist. For the first time, Bridenstine said that the agency would consider commercial rockets to get its crew capsule off the ground. For NASA, travel to deep space would no longer be SLS-or-bust."
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science “Will the future of science eventually necessarily be driven by machines that operate on a level that we can never reach? I don’t know. It’s a good question.”
Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox "Maybe we are not alone and have not been. 'The click beetles in my backyard don’t notice that they’re surrounded by intelligent beings — namely my neighbors and me,' Shostak said, 'but we’re here, nonetheless.'"