Science

Follow the headline link to get to the NASA’s Eyes home page. There are simulations/data visualizations for the solar system, Earth’s vital signs (think air temperature, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide levels, etc), exoplanets (scroll, scroll, scroll), and, my favorite, the Mars lander situation.

Take time to go through these. They are a lot of fun. Try clicking, scrolling, and dragging the various elements. There’s a lot of detail.

On the Mars lander, load the page and the simulation will start. Now click/tap the “rate” arrows (lower right of the display) to speed up and slow down the simulation. At the beginning, you’ll want to speed up (I’d go to a minute per second) until you get to about 10 minutes to touchdown, then slow back down to watch it all unfold. Drag to change your view, and scroll to zoom in. Great fun!

Ben Evans, AmericaSpace:

In the early hours of 30 June 1971, the Soviet Union prepared to welcome its three latest cosmonaut heroes back to Earth after a record-breaking mission. Not only had the Soyuz 11 team—Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev—spent more than 23 days in orbit, but they had also successfully occupied the world’s first true space station. It was a fitting response to the U.S. achievement of placing a man on the Moon. As the commander of one of the recovery helicopters spotted the parachute of Soyuz 11’s descent module, it was a glorious sight. The helicopters touched down and the would-be rescuers made their way cheerfully to the spacecraft, still superheated and charred from re-entry.

They could not have anticipated the horror that they would find inside.

A rarely told addition to the pantheon of space tragedies.

New York Times:

Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology.

And:

The bacteria are alive, though unusually shaped and reproducing slowly. But their cells operate according to a new set of biological rules, producing familiar proteins with a reconstructed genetic code.

The achievement one day may lead to organisms that produce novel medicines or other valuable molecules, as living factories. These synthetic bacteria also may offer clues as to how the genetic code arose in the early history of life.

The potential here is astonishing, both for good and for harm. This is not simply editing DNA, this is creating life forms from scratch. Truly a landmark.

Eric Ralph, Teslarati:

Six weeks after the spacecraft completed its orbital launch debut, SpaceX’s first flight-proven Crew Dragon capsule suffered a catastrophic explosion seconds before a planned SuperDraco test fire.

And:

The April 20th event is the first time in the known history of SpaceX’s orbital spacecraft program that a vehicle – in this case, the first completed and flight-proven Crew Dragon capsule – has suffered a total failure. Regardless of the accident investigation’s ultimate conclusions, the road ahead of Crew Dragon’s first crewed test flight has become far more arduous.

Here’s video showing the explosion:

https://www.twitter.com/Astronut099/status/1119825093742530560

This is a terrible setback. [H/T Brother Stu]

Click the headline link. A neural network will create a face from scratch. Reload the page for a completely new one.

This is fascinating and terrifying at the same time. The power of AI is remarkable, but no doubt there are some great difficulties ahead. More realistic and effective fake news, counterfeit people, and AI that takes jobs away, perhaps creating new jobs along the way, but with a gap that forces many people to retool their skillsets.

Keep refreshing those faces, keep an eye out for anomalies. The ears seem especially susceptible to flaws. All very interesting.

Reuters:

The Chang’e-4 lunar probe, launched in December, made the “soft landing” at 0226 GMT and transmitted the first-ever “close range” image of the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration said.

The moon is tidally locked to Earth, rotating at the same rate as it orbits our planet, so most of the far side – or “dark side” – is never visible to us. Previous spacecraft have seen the far side, but none has landed on it.

And:

As soon as 2022, NASA expects to begin building a new space station laboratory to orbit the moon, as a pit stop for missions to distant parts of the solar system.

A return to the space race, with the moon as a pitstop for the journey to Mars.

IEEE Spectrum:

The inconvenient truth of future 5G networks is that their increased high-speed bandwidth, and the use of the millimeter wave spectrum (the radio spectrum above 30 gigahertz) to achieve it, comes at a price: Those radio signals barely propagate around the corners of buildings.

In other words, you need a lot more hardware to distribute that sweet, sweet high speed 5G around cities. But that extra hardware means lots of construction, clutter, traffic disruptions and ugly antennas hanging everywhere.

What to do? Someone came up with the idea of turning manhole covers into 5G antennas.

Clever.

Texas Monthly:

To explore the inner workings of the heart is to discover a form and a function that can inspire thoughts of the divine in the most determined atheist. It is a marvel of strength, efficiency, and tenacity. About the size of a human fist—your fist, custom-designed to your unique size—it nestles perfectly at an angle deep inside the chest, protected by the rib cage and a cushion of lungs. Weighing about eight to eleven ounces, about the same as a running shoe, it has four hollow chambers, two atria and two ventricles that look, in pictures, like ancient temples carved out of caves. Those hollows hold perfectly regulated amounts of blood. The heart also has its own system of valves, muscles, and electrical currents that make sure nothing goes wrong. In fact, it’s easy to believe in the heart as a perpetual-motion machine: it beats 60 to 100 times per minute, about 115,000 times a day, more than 2.5 billion beats in an average lifetime.

This is a book excerpt. It’s visceral and fascinating. It has me hooked.

Bloomberg:

The world lacks a great all-around red. Always has. We’ve made do with alternatives that could be toxic or plain gross. The gladiators smeared their faces with mercury-based vermilion. Titian painted with an arsenic-based mineral called realgar. The British army’s red coats were infused with crushed cochineal beetles. For decades, red Lego bricks contained cadmium, a carcinogen.

Yikes!

More than 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity, and/or opacity. Red 254, aka Ferrari red, for example, is safe and popular, but it’s also carbon-based, leaving it susceptible to fading in the rain or the heat.

And:

Subramanian, more scientist than chief executive, is now hunting for a similarly safe, inorganic red derivative of YInMn—something that could put Ferrari red, which is worth an estimated $300 million annually, well in its rearview mirror.

Fantastic article. Had no idea this market was so huge.

The other night, I was at dinner, and conversation turned to space exploration and to the earliest days of Soviet Russia’s Sputnik and Lunik satellite launches. What followed was a story so unbelievable, I had to do some digging to convince myself it wasn’t just a folk legend.

From Popular Science, a few years back, soon after the story was declassified:

Sometime between the end of 1959 and 1960, the Soviet Union toured several countries with an exhibit of its industrial and economic achievements. Among the artifacts were a Sputnik and a Lunik upper stage that contained the payload, the latter freshly painted with viewing windows cut into the nose.

Remember, this was the height of the Cold War, and the start of the Space Race. Fear of falling behind was rampant and, given our lack of visible results at the time, was realistic.

So what do you do if you see that your rival is touring the world with their technology? You plan a technapping caper, of course.

Incredible story. Take a few minutes and read it. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. This should be Andy Weir’s next book (he wrote The Martian).