Fed2 Star - June 24, 2018 - page 1 (of 2)
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Fiona Craig
Jun 24, 2018, 6:25:59 AM6/24/18
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Fed2 Star
Earthdate June 24, 2018
[This is a subscription mailing list. Details about how to stop
receiving it are at the foot of the email.]
For a fancy formatted version go the Fed2 Star website:
http://www.ibgames.net/fednews/current/index.html
In this week’s Fed2 Star: the newsdroid take a break so Thing2’s mental
health problems can be addressed, Mars retrograde, finding organic
compounds on Ceres, upgrading the large hadron collider, looking for
alien space junk, printing new corneas to order, suffering the
after-effects of too much exercise, running out of a key ingredient
needed for beer, a robot that irons your clothes, and a gallery of women
involved in the space industry.
Official News part one
THING2’S DEPRESSION WORSENS, SO THERE WILL BE NO STAR NEXT WEEK
by Hazed
My newsdroid Thing2 seems to be spiralling into a decline and I am not
sure what to do about it.
While depressed robots are not completely unknown – we all remember poor
Marvin the Paranoid Android – they are extremely rare. Usually
manufacturers of droids take great care that their machines are imbued
with a sunny disposition, or at least a neutral one. Even those robots
with a pseudo-human personality and a streak of independence are
controlled by their initial programming, much as organic creatures are
subject to the dictates of their genes.
So quite why Thing2 should suddenly be afflicted with such an extreme
case of the black zlitherworm, I don’t know. I initially thought that it
was caused by guilt at the errors it made in a recent bulletin, but now
I wonder if I have got cause and effect the wrong way round. Perhaps it
wasn’t the mistakes that made Thing2 depressed, it was the depression
that made Thing2 make mistakes!
So I am sending all three back to the factory for tests. Thing2
obviously needs some work, and the other two need to be examined in case
they also have some incipient line of code that is just waiting to be
triggered by something resulting in a similar mental meltdown.
The Star will be back on Sunday July 8 – by which time Alan may be
recovered enough from his unpleasant malady to produce at least a short
issue of his Winding Down. Fingers (or equivalent) crossed!
REAL LIFE NEWS: MARS IS ABOUT TO GO INTO REVERSE
by Hazed
For the past few months Mars has been travelling across the night sky in
an easterly direction. On New Year’s Day it could be found in the
constellation of Libra, and its movements since then have taken it to
Capricornus, the constellation of the sea goat. But on June 28, this
easterly movement is going to stop, and Mars will be going retrograde.
For the next two months it will go west, before it pauses again on
August 28 and turns direction back to an easterly trajectory.
Of course, Mars isn’t really changing direction. It’s the loops made by
the orbits as the Earth and Mars go round the sun at different rates
make it appear as if it is. It’s just a matter of perspective. You can
see the effect when you are driving on a motorway (or highway for our
American readers). When you overtake a car which is going in the same
direction as you, but moving slower, it will appear to be moving backwards.
When Mars comes to an apparent stop next week, it will be at its closest
distance to Earth – just 42.3 million miles. That means it will shine in
the night sky 25 times brighter than it did at the start of the year
when it was 181 million miles away.
So you won’t have to fly so far to visit Chez Diesel!
Source: https://www.space.com/40968-mars-retrograde-guide.html
REAL LIFE NEWS: CERES HAS ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
by Hazed
The dwarf planet Ceres has a lot more carbon-based compounds than was
previously thought. These organic compounds are the chemical building
blocks for life.
Scientists discovered last year that the surface was scattered with
patches of organic material. They also found that the surface is rich in
water ice, and the crust contains ice, salts and hydrated materials.
These are signs that there may have been an ocean on the planet in the
distant past.
Water and carbon are both considered to be essential ingredients for life.
Now, a new paper says that there is a much higher concentration of these
carbon-based compounds on Ceres’ surface that was previously thought.
The study by a team of scientists from Brown University and Carnegie
Institution of Washington was led by Hannah Kaplan. She explained, “We
estimate that as much as 40 to 50 per cent of the spectral signal we see
on Ceres is explained by organics. That’s a huge difference compared to
the 6 to 10 per cent previously reported based on terrestrial organic
compounds.”
The new estimate of the amount of carbon compounds on the surface comes
about because of a change in the way it is studied. Previous
measurements looked at the reflectance spectra of Ceres’ organic
material and compared it to rocks on Earth. The new study instead
compares it to meteorites, which have a different spectral reflectance
to Earth rocks.
So it’s not so much that new things have been found on Ceres, as that
the data has been interpreted differently. Scientists believe the old
way of comparing to Earth rocks led to the amount of carbon being
underestimated.
They still don’t know why Ceres has such a high level of organic
compounds. Possibilities are that they were delivered by comets
colliding with the surface, or that they formed directly on the surface.
Future missions are going to be necessary to figure out what’s going on
with the surface of Ceres.
Source:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/14/geoboffins_are_baffled_at_why_ceres_contains_so_much_carbon/
REAL LIFE NEWS: LARGE HADRON COLLIDER TO GET AN UPGRADE
by Hazed
The Large Hadron Collider which lives in a massive tunnel at Cern in
Switzerland has been smashing particles together to see what happens
since it opened. Now an upgrade is planned to make it even more powerful.
Costing 950m Swiss francs (about $950m or £720m), the project will
involve installing new buildings, access shafts, service tunnels and
heavy equipment at the lab on the outskirts of Geneva. This will make
the collider a lot more sensitive to anomalies and quirks in the laws of
physics, which could lead to entirely new theories of the universe.
The upgrade means that the souped-up accelerator will have proton beams
so intense that the number of collisions will be between five and ten
times greater than is possible today.
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/15/720m-large-hadron-collider-upgrade-could-upend-particle-physics
REAL LIFE NEWS: A DIFFERENT WAY TO SPOT ALIENS
by Hazed
An astronomer has come up with a new way to detect alien life on
extra-solar planets. Instead of looking for massive buildings on the
surface, or spaceships zooming around alien star systems, he says we
should look for space junk orbiting around distant exoplanets.
Research by Socas-Navarro, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica
de Canarias, suggests that fleets of satellites in orbit around planets
could be sufficiently dense that we could detect them from Earth using
current technologies. He says that a ring of satellites together with
accumulating space junk should produce a characteristic light curve
signature when an alien planet passes in front of its star – the transit
method of detection.
It’s an intriguing idea. The transit method has been used to detect
hundreds of exoplanets over the past thirty years, and with new massive
telescopes coming online soon our ability to detect them will only get
better.
Source:
https://gizmodo.com/we-should-search-for-aliens-by-looking-for-their-space-1826670642
Earthdate June 24, 2018
[This is a subscription mailing list. Details about how to stop
receiving it are at the foot of the email.]
For a fancy formatted version go the Fed2 Star website:
http://www.ibgames.net/fednews/current/index.html
In this week’s Fed2 Star: the newsdroid take a break so Thing2’s mental
health problems can be addressed, Mars retrograde, finding organic
compounds on Ceres, upgrading the large hadron collider, looking for
alien space junk, printing new corneas to order, suffering the
after-effects of too much exercise, running out of a key ingredient
needed for beer, a robot that irons your clothes, and a gallery of women
involved in the space industry.
Official News part one
THING2’S DEPRESSION WORSENS, SO THERE WILL BE NO STAR NEXT WEEK
by Hazed
My newsdroid Thing2 seems to be spiralling into a decline and I am not
sure what to do about it.
While depressed robots are not completely unknown – we all remember poor
Marvin the Paranoid Android – they are extremely rare. Usually
manufacturers of droids take great care that their machines are imbued
with a sunny disposition, or at least a neutral one. Even those robots
with a pseudo-human personality and a streak of independence are
controlled by their initial programming, much as organic creatures are
subject to the dictates of their genes.
So quite why Thing2 should suddenly be afflicted with such an extreme
case of the black zlitherworm, I don’t know. I initially thought that it
was caused by guilt at the errors it made in a recent bulletin, but now
I wonder if I have got cause and effect the wrong way round. Perhaps it
wasn’t the mistakes that made Thing2 depressed, it was the depression
that made Thing2 make mistakes!
So I am sending all three back to the factory for tests. Thing2
obviously needs some work, and the other two need to be examined in case
they also have some incipient line of code that is just waiting to be
triggered by something resulting in a similar mental meltdown.
The Star will be back on Sunday July 8 – by which time Alan may be
recovered enough from his unpleasant malady to produce at least a short
issue of his Winding Down. Fingers (or equivalent) crossed!
REAL LIFE NEWS: MARS IS ABOUT TO GO INTO REVERSE
by Hazed
For the past few months Mars has been travelling across the night sky in
an easterly direction. On New Year’s Day it could be found in the
constellation of Libra, and its movements since then have taken it to
Capricornus, the constellation of the sea goat. But on June 28, this
easterly movement is going to stop, and Mars will be going retrograde.
For the next two months it will go west, before it pauses again on
August 28 and turns direction back to an easterly trajectory.
Of course, Mars isn’t really changing direction. It’s the loops made by
the orbits as the Earth and Mars go round the sun at different rates
make it appear as if it is. It’s just a matter of perspective. You can
see the effect when you are driving on a motorway (or highway for our
American readers). When you overtake a car which is going in the same
direction as you, but moving slower, it will appear to be moving backwards.
When Mars comes to an apparent stop next week, it will be at its closest
distance to Earth – just 42.3 million miles. That means it will shine in
the night sky 25 times brighter than it did at the start of the year
when it was 181 million miles away.
So you won’t have to fly so far to visit Chez Diesel!
Source: https://www.space.com/40968-mars-retrograde-guide.html
REAL LIFE NEWS: CERES HAS ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
by Hazed
The dwarf planet Ceres has a lot more carbon-based compounds than was
previously thought. These organic compounds are the chemical building
blocks for life.
Scientists discovered last year that the surface was scattered with
patches of organic material. They also found that the surface is rich in
water ice, and the crust contains ice, salts and hydrated materials.
These are signs that there may have been an ocean on the planet in the
distant past.
Water and carbon are both considered to be essential ingredients for life.
Now, a new paper says that there is a much higher concentration of these
carbon-based compounds on Ceres’ surface that was previously thought.
The study by a team of scientists from Brown University and Carnegie
Institution of Washington was led by Hannah Kaplan. She explained, “We
estimate that as much as 40 to 50 per cent of the spectral signal we see
on Ceres is explained by organics. That’s a huge difference compared to
the 6 to 10 per cent previously reported based on terrestrial organic
compounds.”
The new estimate of the amount of carbon compounds on the surface comes
about because of a change in the way it is studied. Previous
measurements looked at the reflectance spectra of Ceres’ organic
material and compared it to rocks on Earth. The new study instead
compares it to meteorites, which have a different spectral reflectance
to Earth rocks.
So it’s not so much that new things have been found on Ceres, as that
the data has been interpreted differently. Scientists believe the old
way of comparing to Earth rocks led to the amount of carbon being
underestimated.
They still don’t know why Ceres has such a high level of organic
compounds. Possibilities are that they were delivered by comets
colliding with the surface, or that they formed directly on the surface.
Future missions are going to be necessary to figure out what’s going on
with the surface of Ceres.
Source:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/14/geoboffins_are_baffled_at_why_ceres_contains_so_much_carbon/
REAL LIFE NEWS: LARGE HADRON COLLIDER TO GET AN UPGRADE
by Hazed
The Large Hadron Collider which lives in a massive tunnel at Cern in
Switzerland has been smashing particles together to see what happens
since it opened. Now an upgrade is planned to make it even more powerful.
Costing 950m Swiss francs (about $950m or £720m), the project will
involve installing new buildings, access shafts, service tunnels and
heavy equipment at the lab on the outskirts of Geneva. This will make
the collider a lot more sensitive to anomalies and quirks in the laws of
physics, which could lead to entirely new theories of the universe.
The upgrade means that the souped-up accelerator will have proton beams
so intense that the number of collisions will be between five and ten
times greater than is possible today.
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/15/720m-large-hadron-collider-upgrade-could-upend-particle-physics
REAL LIFE NEWS: A DIFFERENT WAY TO SPOT ALIENS
by Hazed
An astronomer has come up with a new way to detect alien life on
extra-solar planets. Instead of looking for massive buildings on the
surface, or spaceships zooming around alien star systems, he says we
should look for space junk orbiting around distant exoplanets.
Research by Socas-Navarro, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica
de Canarias, suggests that fleets of satellites in orbit around planets
could be sufficiently dense that we could detect them from Earth using
current technologies. He says that a ring of satellites together with
accumulating space junk should produce a characteristic light curve
signature when an alien planet passes in front of its star – the transit
method of detection.
It’s an intriguing idea. The transit method has been used to detect
hundreds of exoplanets over the past thirty years, and with new massive
telescopes coming online soon our ability to detect them will only get
better.
Source:
https://gizmodo.com/we-should-search-for-aliens-by-looking-for-their-space-1826670642
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