Bampot

Engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the spacecraft’s thrusters, which keep the distant explorer pointed at Earth so that it can receive commands, send engineering data, and provide the unique science data it is gathering.

After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank. The clogging reduces how efficiently the thrusters can generate force. After weeks of careful planning, the team switched the spacecraft to a different set of thrusters.

The thrusters are fueled by liquid hydrazine, which is turned into gases and released in tens-of-milliseconds-long puffs to gently tilt the spacecraft’s antenna toward Earth. If the clogged thruster were healthy it would need to conduct about 40 of these short pulses per day.

Switching to different thrusters would have been a relatively simple operation for the mission in 1980 or even 2002. But the spacecraft’s age has introduced new challenges, primarily related to power supply and temperature. The mission has turned off all non-essential onboard systems, including some heaters, on both spacecraft to conserve their gradually shrinking electrical power supply, which is generated by decaying plutonium.

During the first billion years after the Big Bang, as the first stars and galaxies switched on and filled the darkness with new light, they also caused another transformation: ionizing the neutral hydrogen gas filling the universe. Until recently, astronomers struggled to explain how it could happen. Ionizing hydrogen requires high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light, and the sparse, fledgling galaxies did not seem up to the task. Now, JWST, NASA’s orbiting infrared observatory, has turned that on its head. It is finding so many bright young galaxies and luminous black holes that there may be an oversupply of UV light.

“We’re beginning to call this an overproduction crisis, because it seems like we just have too many ionizing photons in the universe."

About 900 miles off the coast of Chile along the Nazca Ridge, a slew of new discoveries have thrilled marine scientists. During a 28-day expedition, researchers aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s vessel Falkor (too) mapped a previously unknown seamount along the ridge’s mountain chain, along with nine others. These included a pristine 800-square-meter coral garden.

The team documented a live Promachoteuthis squid, “a genus that is so rare that only three species have been described based on only a few collected specimens, several of which are from the late 1800s,” a statement about the findings says. “Until now, the squid genus has only been characterized from dead samples found in nets.”

Scientists also recorded the adorable Casper octopus, marking the first time the species has been spotted in the Southern Pacific, and two rare Bathyphysa siphonophores, commonly known as flying spaghetti monsters.

Questions about the reliability of the transistors on the Europa Clipper spacecraft arose earlier this year after similar problems cropped up elsewhere. With the tight launch window looming, NASA rushed to conduct tests to verify that the electronic parts could survive the $5 billion mission to determine whether the suspected ocean beneath Europa’s icy crust might be suitable for life.

It will take six years for Europa Clipper to reach Jupiter, where it will orbit the gas giant every three weeks. Dozens of flybys are planned of Europa as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers), allowing cameras and other instruments — including ice-penetrating radar — to map virtually the entire moon.

Europa Clipper is the biggest spacecraft ever built by NASA to investigate another planet, spanning more than 100 feet (30 meters) with its solar panels unfurled.

Researchers said on Monday they had designed the first robotic leg with "artificial muscles"—oil-filled bags allowing machines to move more like humans—that can jump nimbly across a range of surfaces.

The small, disembodied robot leg was shown hopping over grass, sand and rocks in a video released alongside a new study in Nature Communications

Electrohydraulic musculoskeletal robotic leg for agile, adaptive, yet energy-efficient locomotion

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51568-3

The space agency's VaMEx initiative aims to explore the canyon's gorges and caves for the first time. It will also search for traces of liquid water and thus possibly for life that could exist there in protected niches.

To this end, DLR wants to bring a swarm of autonomous, interconnected robots to Mars: They will operate on the ground, in the air and in caves, where they will collect images and other data.

Caves are not only interesting as locations for lunar or Martian bases. They offer protection from cosmic radiation, more moderate temperatures and therefore also a good environment for the preservation of life, which could have emerged billions of years ago when conditions on Mars were much more favorable.

When the robots on the ground enter caves, they are shielded from the surface of Mars and cannot communicate directly with the gateway. The concept therefore also includes repeater stations, which pass on the recorded images and data in a transport chain—from the robot in the cave to the gateway on the surface of the planet.

OP: @overholt@glammr.us

The tardigrade’s tiny size belies both its astounding physical resilience and its charisma. Also known as water bears or moss piglets, they can survive extreme temperatures and pressures, withstand radiation levels that would kill most organisms, and reanimate after long periods of desiccation or oxygen deprivation. They can even handle being in outer space without too much trouble — impressive for creatures that are roughly the size of a grain of sand. As a result, the 1300 known species of tardigrades are found everywhere on Earth: from the deep seas, to rainforests, to Antarctica.

The first recorded observations of these remarkable microfauna were published in 1773 by the German pastor Johann August Ephraim Goeze. Because they looked like tiny bears to his eyes, he called these strange creatures kleiner Wasserbär, “little water bears” (the name “tardigrade” came later in 1777, when an Italian biologist highlighted their slow movements). Goeze’s observations and drawings covered just a few pages, appended to his German translation of Charles Bonnet’s Traite d’insectologie, but they communicated the same wonder and fascination for tardigrades that many still feel today.

Every space elevator design has three different components: an anchor, a tether, and a counterweight. Each would require its own technologies.

The anchor is simple enough; it's how the system interfaces with Ceres. The surface of Ceres is primarily made of clay, which is relatively good for anchoring technologies

The tether is where the technology falls short on Earth—no material known to science can withstand the forces exerted on the tether of a passively controlled space elevator when it is tied to Earth. However, the closest we can come, something space elevator enthusiasts mention as almost a holy grail, is carbon nanotubes.

The counterweight is much simpler, as it can be just a big, dumb mass. However, its mass is proportional to the necessary length of cable—the heavier the mass, the shorter the cable. So, the tradeoff between having a heavier counterweight and a shorter cable is another design consideration when considering these systems.

Calculations from the team show that, with only a little more technological development, all three main systems could be ready for installation on Ceres itself. But what advantages does it have? It could be helpful as a launching point for accessing other asteroids in the asteroid belt.

But before it can provide any of those advantages, someone is going to have to pay for it. Estimates of the overall cost of the system total about $5.2 billion—not too far out of the range of larger-scale space exploration projects. But more than most countries are likely willing to pony up for a grand infrastructure project that hasn't yet proven its benefit.

The Wound Man is a surgical diagram which first appeared in European medical manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The illustration acted as an annotated table of contents to guide the reader through various injuries and diseases whose related cures could be found on the text's nearby pages. The image first appeared in a printed book in 1491 when it was included in the Venetian Fasciculus medicinae, likely Europe's first printed medical miscellany.

Thereafter it circulated widely in printed books until well into the seventeenth century. 

The Wound Man has since become a recognisable figure in popular culture.

The Wound Man illustrates various injuries that a person might receive through war, accident, or disease: cuts and bruises from multiple weapons, rashes and pustules, thorn scratches, and the bites of venomous animals.

The figure also includes some schematic anatomical outlines of several organs within his unusual, transparent abdomen.

Another high-ranking government official who investigated UFOs/UAPs is ready to tell their story.

Jay Stratton, the former director of the U.S. government’s secretive Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, has struck a memoir deal with HarperCollins. Stratton represents the most senior former U.S government official yet to go public about their direct involvement in the investigation of UAP and non-human intelligence.

For paleontologists who study animals that lived long ago, fossilized remains tell only part of the story of an animal's life. While a well-preserved skeleton can provide hints at what an ancient animal ate or how it moved, irrefutable proof of these behaviors is hard to come by. But sometimes, scientists luck out with extraordinary fossils that preserve something beyond the animal's body.

Case in point: in a study published in the journal Current Biology, researchers found fossilized seeds in the stomachs of one of the earliest birds. This discovery shows that these birds were eating fruits, despite a long-standing hypothesis that this species of bird feasted on fish (and more recent hypotheses it ate insects) with its incredibly strong teeth.

Longipteryx chaoyangensis lived 120 million years ago in what's now northeastern China. It's among the earliest known birds, and one of the strangest.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 2, from 1990.

There have been numerous reports recently concerning sightings of UFOs in the Soviet Union. The most dramatic have involved aliens perambulating in parks, or even dumping (presumably) unwanted debris from their craft. The bulk of these articles have originated from the official news agency, TASS, which one usually associates with announcements of industrial achievements, or synopses of leadership speeches. As well as fulfilling this prosaic function, it has become a kind of Russian Guardian, chronicling the adventures of aliens, psychic healers and abominable snowmen. This article will examine the Russian UFO stories which have been circulating in recent months.