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The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) has been shrouded in mystery since its maiden flight in 2011. Designed by Boeing and operated by the U.S. Space Force (USSF), this remotely operated, reusable space plane is designed to operate in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), 240 to 800 km (150 to 500 mi) above the Earth, and test reusable vehicle technologies that support long-term space objectives. On December 29th, 2023, the X-37B began its seventh mission (OTV-7) and has reportedly been conducting experiments on the effects of space radiation and testing Space Domain Awareness (SDA) technologies.

As part of this mission, the X-37B will soon begin executing a series of novel maneuvers to change its orbit around Earth. These maneuvers will consist of the spacecraft brushing against Earth’s upper atmosphere to shed speed and lower its orbit without expending much fuel—a technique known as “aerobraking.” This is the first time the X-37B has performed such a maneuver, which will help it evade detection by potentially hostile nations and perform undetected low passes over Earth during future missions.

According to a statement by the USSF, this latest maneuver leverages six successful missions in LEO and decades of lessons learned from missions to the Moon and Mars. In 1997, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) orbiter used its solar panels as “wings” to control its passage through Mars’ tenuous upper atmosphere and lower its orbit over several months. More recently, aerobraking has been used by the Mars Odyssey in 2001, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2006, and the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2017-2018.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle taxiing on the flightline on March 30th, 2010, at the Astrotech facility in Titusville, Florida. Credit: USAF

“This novel and efficient series of maneuvers demonstrates the Space Force’s commitment to achieving groundbreaking innovation as it conducts national security missions in space,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. “This first-of-a-kind maneuver from the X-37B is an incredibly important milestone for the United States Space Force as we seek to expand our aptitude and ability to perform in this challenging domain,” added Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. “The success is a testament to the dedication and perseverance of the team.”

Beyond these experiments, very little is known about the X-37B’s capabilities and purpose. However, during the Aspen Security Forum in 2019, former U.S. Air Force (USAF) Secretary Heather Wilson explained how the X-37B capabilities allow it to avoid detection, saying:

“[The X-37B is] fascinating [because it] can do an orbit that looks like an egg and, when it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is. Which means our adversaries don’t know – and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries – where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that.”

As Jonathan McDowell – an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics – told Military.com in an interview at the time:

“[Wilson’s comments may shed light on] a previously secret orbit-related capability. The dip into the atmosphere causes a change in the timing of when it next comes overhead. So [trackers’] predictions are off, and [they] have to search for it all over again. Even a timing change makes more work for [adversaries] than just being able to use the existing orbital prediction.”

Once the aerobrake maneuver is complete, the X-37B will resume its tests and experiments until they are fulfilled. As the USSF indicated before the launch of the OTV-7 mission, these tests include operating in new orbital regimes, experimenting with future SDA technologies, and investigating the radiation effects on plant seeds provided by NASA – the “Seeds-2” experiment. The spacecraft will also eject some of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation. At this point, the vehicle will de-orbit and return to Earth as it has during its six previous missions.

Further Reading: Live Science, USSF

The post Space Force’s X-37B will Perform “Never Before-Seen Maneuvers” in Orbit appeared first on Universe Today.

During a fight between two male mice, one will often run to a female mouse to distract their aggressor, a bait-and-switch strategy that could help abate social conflicts

A simulator for the process of scientific discovery shows that AI agents still fall short of human scientists and engineers in coming up with hypotheses and carrying out experiments on their own

Chemists have developed a straightforward method to convert common chemicals like carboxylic acids, alcohols, and alkanes directly into valuable alkenes.

Researchers explore how the domesticated flightless silkworm moth (Bombyx mori), a prominent insect model in olfactory research, uses wing flapping to manipulate airflow, enhancing their ability to detect distant pheromones. These findings highlight how moths guide pheromones to their odor sensors in antennae, and suggest potential applications for designing advanced robotic systems for odor source localization. This could inspire future innovations in drones and provide design guidelines for robots to locate odor sources.

Researchers explore how the domesticated flightless silkworm moth (Bombyx mori), a prominent insect model in olfactory research, uses wing flapping to manipulate airflow, enhancing their ability to detect distant pheromones. These findings highlight how moths guide pheromones to their odor sensors in antennae, and suggest potential applications for designing advanced robotic systems for odor source localization. This could inspire future innovations in drones and provide design guidelines for robots to locate odor sources.

Researchers have unveiled a vision system inspired by feline eyes to enhance object detection in various lighting conditions. Featuring a unique shape and reflective surface, the system reduces glare in bright environments and boosts sensitivity in low-light scenarios. By filtering unnecessary details, this technology significantly improves the performance of single-lens cameras, representing a notable advancement in robotic vision capabilities.

Researchers have unveiled a vision system inspired by feline eyes to enhance object detection in various lighting conditions. Featuring a unique shape and reflective surface, the system reduces glare in bright environments and boosts sensitivity in low-light scenarios. By filtering unnecessary details, this technology significantly improves the performance of single-lens cameras, representing a notable advancement in robotic vision capabilities.

Researchers produced 3D-printed, semiconductor-free logic gates, which perform computations in active electronic devices. As they don't require semiconductor materials, they represent a step toward 3D printing an entire active electronic device.

If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.

I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.

The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose.  So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original).  But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.

Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.

You can guess the most important reason!

Some excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Oy!  But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.

 Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot. No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

14 lines—too much!  But we all know the reason: DEVICES!

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Those statistics are depressing.

So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.

Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding.  All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.

Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).

And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss477_Terry_Sejnowski_2024_10_15.mp3 Download MP3

In ChatGPT and the Future of AI, the sequel to The Deep Learning Revolution, Terrence Sejnowski offers a nuanced exploration of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and what their future holds. How should we go about understanding LLMs? Do these language models truly understand what they are saying? Or is it possible that what appears to be intelligence in LLMs may be a mirror that merely reflects the intelligence of the interviewer? In this book, Sejnowski, a pioneer in computational approaches to understanding brain function, answers all our urgent questions about this astonishing new technology.

Sejnowski begins by describing the debates surrounding LLMs’ comprehension of language and exploring the notions of “thinking” and “intelligence.” He then takes a deep dive into the historical evolution of language models, focusing on the role of transformers, the correlation between computing power and model size, and the intricate mathematics shaping LLMs. Sejnowski also provides insight into the historical roots of LLMs and discusses the potential future of AI, focusing on next-generation LLMs inspired by nature and the importance of developing energy-efficient technologies.

Grounded in Sejnowski’s dual expertise in AI and neuroscience, ChatGPT and the Future of AI is the definitive guide to understanding the intersection of AI and human intelligence.

Terrence J. Sejnowski is Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Distinguished Professor at the University of California at San Diego. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain with Patricia Churchland. He was instrumental in shaping the BRAIN Initiative that was announced by the White House in 2013, and he received the prestigious Gruber Prize in Neuroscience in 2022.

Sejnowski and Shermer discuss:

• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• What is AI and AGI?
• The alignment problem
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
• What is thinking?
• How brains evolved
• Reverse engineering brains
• How language evolved
• Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
• Emotions, mind, and sentience
• What is “mind”, “thinking”, and “consciousness”, and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• The self and other minds
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Does Watson know that it beat the great Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!?
• Self-driving cars
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it
• AI as an existential threat
• Why there is no such thing as “the” singularity. There are lots of them and we’ve already experienced them and will continue to do so.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Friends who blow hot and cold put more strain on your physical and mental health than enemies. Here's how to spot them and handle them

Puppies that are raised in someone's home seem to benefit from that extra human interaction, by asking for help at a younger age than those brought up in kennels

As I reported earlier, last Friday anti-Israel protesters at the University of Chicago went wild, vandalizing our Henry Moore sculpture and the surrounding area with spray paint, putting up illegal banners, trying to lock the main northern gate to the campus, and battling with police (three protesters were arrested). University of Chicago United for Palestine (UCUP) issued a document (below) explaining their actions.

And they also put an “installation” on the Quad, consisting of a tent. It’s clearly designed to evoke the Encampment of last year, and has a sign saying “We are still here and Palestine is still here”.  According to the placard, the tent should be down by today. It’s authorized free speech, but I can’t say that it doesn’t make me queasy. Another year of demonstrations, Jew hatred, and disruptions seems to be in the offing.

The installation, photographed by a member of the University community:

UChicago United for Palestine, a group of students that includes the Students for Justice in Palestine, also put up a Google Document declaring their intentions and motivations. This too is free speech, but to me it’s nauseating. Click headline to read:

It’s the same boilerplate activism, but I noticed the repeated use of the words “Zionist entity” to refer to “Israel”, with the latter word hardly being used at all (and not capitalized when it is). The new term is of course meant to deny the existence of Israel, and also to suggest that it’s an artificial entity, i.e., that Jews aren’t indigenous to the area that is now Israel.

Some excerpts. First, the opening two paragraphs, nearly every word of which is a lie:

It has been more than a year since israel commenced its genocidal assault on Gaza. Armed and enabled by the US government, the Zionist entity has slaughtered more than 42,000 captive Palestinians within this timeframe while also systematically destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and killing tens of thousands more by starvation and preventable disease. Nor has israel’s genocidal rampage been limited to Gaza—Zionist forces have murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank within this timeframe, aggressively expanded israel’s settlement enterprise, and launched repeated attacks on Yemen, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq.

In the past week, israel’s aggression both in Gaza and across the region has reached unprecedented heights. As part of its ongoing effort to ethnically cleanse and erase Northern Gaza, it has imposed a total siege on the area, preventing all food and aid from entering it for the past 13 days. Deliberately assassinating journalists in the northern Gaza Strip, few bravely remain to broadcast to the world. Simultaneously, Israel [they forgot to use a small “i”] has launched an all-out invasion into Lebanon, displacing over a million Lebanese citizens and slaughtering nearly 2,000 in recent weeks. 

Below: a vow to disrupt the University of Chicago.  Unfortunately, the demands they list will not be met by the University, so their demonstrations are futile. I think they know this, which is why they act out, yelling, attacking cops, and vandalizing University property.  Will they be taken any more seriously after throwing red paint on a Henry Moore sculpture? I doubt it.

Note that they say Israel is conducting a “war of expansion in Lebanon”, which is simply a lie showing their willful ignorance of history. Do they not know about UN Resolution 1701 or Hezbollah’s repeated rocket attacks on Israel for a year?

UChicago United for Palestine called this action to interrupt business as usual at the University of Chicago, whose financial and institutional ties with the Zionist entity mirror its objective role as a colonial outpost on Chicago’s South Side—gentrifying neighborhoods and surveilling, policing, and displacing the people who live here. Our experiences during last year’s encampment taught us that our demands—disclosure, divestment, and repair—would not be taken seriously without demonstrating our willingness and ability to use every means at our disposal, including suspending the daily operation of the university. We called this action in conjunction with an international movement against a civil society, state, and international order that prop up the Zionist entity, facilitate its genocide in Palestine, and enable its war of expansion in Lebanon.

Their attack on the statue, which is far more than a celebration of the University’s involvement in developing nuclear weapons. Read what the sculptor said about it.  

More from the document, in which UChicago United swears “to pick apart this university”:

On the afternoon of October 11th, following a rally that drew more than 150 students, community members, and faculty, protestors locked the main gate of the University of Chicago shut before hanging a banner reading “FREE PALESTINE – HANDS OFF LEBANON.” This was the first of a series of autonomous actions that marked the end of the Week of Rage for Palestine and Lebanon, as we passed a year of genocide in Gaza. 

Protestors later marched to a statue commemorating the University’s involvement in the development of the nuclear bomb. A speaker said: “Today, Palestine and Lebanon are being used as the testing grounds of technologies built by universities like this one.” Tags reading FREE GAZA, FUCK THE BOMBS, and KEEP ESCALATING proliferated, and balloons full of paint were thrown at the statue. He continued: “our ultimate message today is that we can pick apart this university, and when we do, we can build something better in its place.” When the crowd regrouped and began to march north to disperse, UCPD cut into the middle of the march, targeting several protestors.

They then recount their battle with cops from the University as well as Chicago city cops, and make clear that their enemies are not just the University of Chicago, but America in general. At least they admit that!  Good luck with dismantling America!  But Americans should realize that the aspirations of the organized nationwide demonstrations go far beyond erasing Israel, extending to the erasure of Western democracies.

. . . . Whether on campus, in the city, or in the street, the Palestine movement must recognize and confront its enemies: the university, the police, American civil society, and the state, all of which collaborate to facilitate dispossession, land theft, and occupation at home and abroad. The people who locked the gate did so to shut down a university that has refused to even acknowledge the destruction of all Gazan universities, much less the ongoing genocide. It symbolized how, while we walk to class every day, the schools in Gaza are bombed, while israel’s genocide against Palestinians continues and the university remains materially and intellectually invested. Protestors painted the nuclear bomb statue red to expose the university’s culpability in the nuclear weapons program, a fact they memorialize through a statue that was explicitly designed to reflect “the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, but also ha[ve] the shape and eye sockets of a skull”—mirrored in the present by its ‘neutral’ research and development programs which directly abet the slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon.

They end by promising to disrupt the campus until Palestine is free.  For them that will be, well, forever, for “Palestine” includes Israel (aka “the Zionist entity”), and Am Yisrael Chai:

. . . We will never stop fighting as long as [Palestinians] face genocide and occupation. We will remain steadfast and committed in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and the cause of all those who face brutal violence and occupation from UCPD and CPD every day. And we will not stop fighting until Palestine is free!

I hope they’re prepared for a long and futile battle. They’ve already lost on campus, and, as Israel slowly wins the war in Gaza and Lebanon, they’ll become increasingly angry that they haven’t removed the Zionist entity “from the river to the sea.”

In June, physicist and origami master Robert Lang went on a Center for Inquiry cruise in the Arctic, visiting the isolated islands of that area as well as Iceland. The cruise headlined Richard Dawkins, and I was offered a last-minute berth, but it seemed too late to me, and now I much regret not going. But Robert has sent two batches of photos from tbe trip, and I’ll show the first one—the flowers of Iceland—this morning.

Robert’s narrative and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Iceland (and Elsewhere) Flowers

Living and working on the edge of the Southern California chaparral, I have a fondness for pretty wildflowers surviving in harsh places, and a recent shipboard trip from Ireland to Iceland provided a few nice examples of mostly unfamiliar blooms. (All IDs thanks to iNaturalist.)

After leaving Ireland and visiting Scotland, we visited islands with progressively harsher climate (though all are moderated by the Gulf Stream—at least, until the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation breaks down). On Shetland, we encountered Cuckooflower (Cardamine pratensis). It’s native throughout Europe and Western Asia:

Then on to the Faroe Islands. There we found Lawn daisy (Bellis perennis), another common European species of daisy:

From there, on to Iceland, the land of fire and ice! We saw plenty of the latter, but didn’t get close enough to see the former, though we did see plenty of its aftereffects in the geography and hot springs.

Near Höfn, we stopped at the base of one of the many glaciers draining the Vatnajokull ice cap; it ended in a small lake surrounded by scree and glacial till that was mostly bare but dotted here and there with lovely little clusters of flowers, starting with this Alpine cinquefoil (Potentilla crantzii):

Next is Sea thrift (Armeria maritima) (I think—iNat suggests this, but still waiting for human confirmation). It grows all over Europe and is also a popular garden or cut flower:

Moss campion (Silene acaulis) is another lovely cluster of tiny flowers that is common all over the high arctic and tundra:

Another campion, Sea campion (Silene uniflora) has larger flowers and interesting hollow vessels at the base of the flowers. (There was another variety of campion that looked similar in iNat; this one looked slightly closer):

From falling ice to falling water. Another stop was one of Iceland’s famous waterfalls, Goðafoss. There’s a lot of melting ice in Iceland, and it makes for many, many spectacular waterfalls (over 10,000 of them, according to Wikipedia). Here’s one of them:

The waterfall is vast and the vistas are sweeping, but there’s also beauty to be found at our very feet, including some of the biggest dandelion flowers I’ve ever seen. Dandelions (Taraxcum sp.) are found worldwide, but the ones in my yard are pretty tiny; this one and its brethren were something like 2” across:

One of the sights of Icelands is the Dimmuborgir lava field, a landscape of twisted spires of lava that originally formed underwater as upwelling lava tubes. There I saw this Eight-petal Mountain-Avens (Dryas octopetala), whose common and Latin names both make reference to its eight petals. An unusual thing, because it’s a member of the Rosaceae, whose petals usually come in five (unless they’ve been bred for more, like ornamental roses):

Marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) is found all over temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. These were growing  near a different waterfall, Dynjandi, which is almost unreal: it pours off of the edge of a cliff some 30 meters wide:

Dynjandi:

Last, the Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis). It’s native to North America, but was introduced into Iceland where it has spread widely. It’s now considered something of a nuisance, but it sure is a pretty nuisance:

Next: Icelandic birds and other critters.

Ever since the advent of space exploration we have seen some amazing images of the planets. New technology often brings with it a new perspective and we have been reminded of this again just recently with images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)  and New Horizons spacecraft. The two objects simultaneously imaged Uranus from different perspectives in an attempt to predict what astronomers would see when they look at exoplanets orbiting other stars. 

Uranus is the 7th planet from the Sun and is recognisable for its wonderful blue-green colour. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 and since then we have been probing its secrets with telescopes and space probes alike. Like the other outermost planets, Uranus is a giant ball of gas and its the presence of methane in its atmosphere that gives it the striking colour. It’s unusual among the other planets since it seems to rotate around the Sun with an axial tilt of 98 degrees so it has really quite extreme seasons. 

This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) Feb. 6, 2023, reveals stunning views of the planet’s rings. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI).

HST and New Horizons have recently turned their gaze on Uranus but for a somewhat unusual project, to help develop imaging techniques for exoplanets. Directly imaging the distant alien worlds is tricky simply due to their distance and often due to their proximity to the host star. It’s of great importance to be able to study them directly to be able to learn more about their nature and possible habitability. Directly imaging exoplanets often just reveals pinpoints of light so researchers have used Uranus as a ‘proxy’ exoplanet to explore new imaging methods. 

The New Horizons instrument payload that is currently doing planetary science, heliospheric measurements, and astrophysical observations. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Uranus was chosen because the majority of exoplanets are gas giants and similar in nature. It was also chosen as New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus at the time of observation placing it 10.5 billion kilometres away. From its vantage point, New Horizons would see a crescent Uranus, a phase often seen on exoplanets when they are at their furthermost point from their star. They used the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera to grab the images with Uranus covering just a few pixels, much like an exoplanet when viewed from Earth. 

While New Horizons was taking its images, HST which was just 2.7 billion km away and with its high quality cameras could capture a fabulous amount of detail in the atmosphere. By comparing the two images, the researchers have been able to see how atmospheric features appear in the New Horizon data to help learn about exoplanet observations. The team found that both HST and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated which revealed that the cloud features were not changing with the rotation of the planet.

This image of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was taken on May 19, 2009 after deployment during Servicing Mission 4. NASA

They also found that New Horizons showed exoplanets are likely to seem dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles. This means that a gas planet like Uranus reflects light differently at partial phases when compared to others. The results are a testimony to the wonderfully insightful approach to cracking an existing challenge in modern astronomy; The direct study of exoplanets. Over the coming years telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which is due for launch in 2027 has the ability to block out light to enable direct observations of exoplanets. This latest study will help to interpret the data revealed in future studies.

Source : NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus

The post Hubble and New Horizons Look at Uranus at the Same Time appeared first on Universe Today.

A group of frogs from Madagascar have mating calls that sound like Star Trek sound effects – now their species names honour captains from the series

This buried rock wall found throughout Rockwall County has people wondering about its origin.

Hangovers: a problem with only one solution.

The post Hungover first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

From brighter TV screens to better medical diagnostics and more efficient solar panels, new research has discovered how to make more molecules stick to the surface of tiny nanocrystals, in a breakthrough that could lead to improvements in everyday technology.