Today I'll take a break from posting chapters of Polemical Judo. (Last time I offered one suggestion - out of 100+ under-appreciated maneuvers in the book - just one that might forestall every 'October Surprise,' thwart most of the cheating, and prevent most pre- or post-election violence. Two sentences. Just two.)
Only now let's take a break for science! (Remember when much of our news cycle was about such things?) I just finished participating in the annual Symposium of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC)... and you can watch some of the amazing - just short of science fictional - projects here.
But the following non-NIAC items are straight out of the (scientific) headlines!
Caltech’s robotic Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) - to search of unexpected flares of light in the night sky - on May 21, 2019, detected a visible light flare that appears to be correlated with gravitational wave event S190521g that was recorded at about the same time by the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave detectors. Graham reported, “In our study, we conclude that the flare is likely the result of a black hole merger, but we cannot completely rule out other possibilities.” So kewl.
Interesting! The Air Force’s secret space plane the X-37 is hush hush so I was surprised by this article about an experiment to test converting sunlight into microwaves, eventually leading to prototype space power-beaming systems.
Future space travelers may have to conduct lifesaving surgical procedures in the near-zero gravity environment of space. That could be a messy — and potentially dangerous — endeavor. The prospect of gushing clouds of blood and intestines might partly be solved by lacrosopic surgery techniques. Even better, injectable robots. Meanwhile, one of the coolest new NIAC grants goes to Dr. Lynn Rothschild’s team developing simple, spore-based ways to grow a variety of drugs when and where needed, via astropharmacology.
Alas, in contrast... not all "space news" credible
Leave the Moon to the kiddies, desperate for their rites of adulthood, making footprints on that (for now) dusty-useless ball. (Though US companies are welcome to rent out hotel rooms and landers for those tourists! And keep sending robots to check for when... not if... I'll someday be proved wrong.)
Meanwhile, along with the Japanese and Europeans, we can go for the real riches, doing what no one else can do.
Meanwhile, along with the Japanese and Europeans, we can go for the real riches, doing what no one else can do.
== More space! ==
Might “Planet Nine” be a primordial black hole, orbiting at the fringes of our solar system, occasionally flaring when it sucks in a drifting comets? Or perhaps micro gravity-lensing background star fields? Those betraying encounters might be detected by a new telescope that will give us better all-sky awareness than ever before.
Venus appears to have volcanoes… and remnant ones arrayed in patterns that appear to mimic in some ways Earth’s “Ring of Fire” and hot spot mantle plumes like under Hawaii and Yellowstone.
Two huge planets orbiting a young but sunlike star 300 light years away have been directly imaged. Wonderful.
A piece of Mars that fell to Earth decades ago is heading back to the Red Planet.
Most of the super-energetic sources seen in this spectacular full map (shown above) of the X-Ray Sky - around 77 percent - are supermassive black holes actively accreting material in the cores of galaxies, or active galactic nuclei. “Within the Milky Way, stars with hot, magnetically active coronae make up 20 percent of the objects. The remaining one percent is made up of an assortment - bright X-ray binaries, supernova remnants, and flares…”
The Dynamic Red All-Sky Monitoring Survey (DREAMS) to be completed 2021 will be able to map the entire southern sky in infrared in just three days, allowing astronomers to rapidly find and track cosmic events. A major step… alongside the new Synoptic telescope in Chile… toward all-sky awareness.
A group of scientists at Harvard and other universities has received NASA’s first-ever funding to search for alien technosignatures—artificial signs of intelligent life—around other stars. The scientists will look for signs of industrial pollutants in other planets’ atmospheres, as well as light reflected from solar panels—both of which could indicate a civilization technologically similar to our own.
More galaxies appear to spin counter clockwise (Earth coordinates) than clockwise, leading to a theory that the universe itself was born with angular momentum and a complex set of spins.
Bing Chen points out how Loren Eiseley stated in his last book The Invisible Pyramid, "If man goes down I do not believe he will ever again have the resources or the strength to defend the sunflower forest and simultaneously to follow the beckoning road across the star fields. It is now or never for both and the price is very high".
== Ponderables ==
Might there be a subtle variation of the fine-structure constant with extreme distance in the universe… and even with directionality effects? If this new study is correct, however, it instead presents a universe with a dipole structure, not unlike the North and South poles of a magnet.
Just 1000 light years away, a black hole found only from the tight orbits of two nearby stars. One of them visible to the naked eye! Close! “An invisible object with a mass at least 4 times that of the Sun can only be a black hole,” and “There must be hundreds of millions of black holes out there, but we know about only very few,” and there are likely many more, some closer still.
An now it is asserted that there may be a LOT of stellar range black holes out there... perhaps enough to account for dark matter? Perhaps they gather in compact clusters, similar to those that ancient races seek as their final homes in the "embrace of tides" effect, you read about in Infinity's Shore and in Heaven's Reach?
And...
Emily Levesque's The Last Stargazers takes you on a personal journey through the art, science, frustrations and passion of modern astronomy, especially those ever-evolving mountaintop tools that let us pry secrets out of the sky - those magnificent telescopes.
Finally.... A cute rap song about cosmology! And a nice video in which some whipper snappers make a to-scale model of the solar system out on a California lake bed.
And for you geeks.... Wow. An artillery shell that incorporates a ramjet to triple its guided range.
Finally.... A cute rap song about cosmology! And a nice video in which some whipper snappers make a to-scale model of the solar system out on a California lake bed.
And for you geeks.... Wow. An artillery shell that incorporates a ramjet to triple its guided range.
And yes, if you don't want to face the business end of munitions, this phase of the American Civil War must be won decisively, overwhelmingly and soon, so we can end the violent fevers (both covid and confederate) and get back to being joyful problem solving, with facts and science.
Next... Chapter nine of Polemical Judo...
America’s place in the world - Part 1:
Pax Americana and the rise of China
