A trio of researchers at Purdue University has developed a new theory to explain why Pluto's moon Charon has a reddish north pole. Phys.Org reports: In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Stephanie Menten, Michael Sori and Ali Bramson, describe their study of the reddish surfaces of many icy objects in the Kuiper Belt, and how they might relate to Charon's reddish pole. Prior research has shown that many icy objects in the Kuiper belt are partly or entirely covered in reddish brown material. Prior research has also shown that the material is a kind of tholin -- compounds that are formed when organic chemicals are showered with radiation. But that has raised the question of where the organic compounds may have come from. In this new effort, the researchers theorize that it comes from methane released from cryovolcanoes. [...] They note that prior research suggests that gases escaping from Pluto are responsible for the reddish pole.

As the ocean froze, the methane would have become trapped in the ice, the researchers note. They note also that as the water became pressurized, cracks would have formed, leading to occasional eruptions. Such cryovolcanic eruptions, they suggest, could have released some amount of methane gas. And if some of that methane gas managed to drift all the way to the north pole, it would have frozen and fallen to the surface. And if it fell to the surface, it would have been subjected to millions of years of radiation from the sun, making it turn red. [...] They found that approximately 1000 billion metric tons of the gas could have made it to northern pole -- more than enough to create a red cap.

An international team of scientists says it has discovered two new "super-Earth" type planets about 100 light-years away, one of which may be suitable for life. NPR reports: Unlike any of the planets in our solar system, the nearly 1,600 known super-Earths are larger than Earth, but lighter than icy planets like Uranus and Neptune. Researchers at Belgium's University of Liege announced Wednesday that they found another one while using Earth-based telescopes to confirm the existence of a different planet initially discovered by a NASA satellite in the same solar system.

NASA's satellite found planet LP 890-9b, which is about 30% larger than Earth and orbits its sun in just 2.7 days. ULiege researchers used their SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes in Chile and Spain to take a closer look at the planet with high-precision cameras. That's when the stargazers discovered another planet, LP 890-9c (renamed SPECULOOS-2c by the ULiege researchers), which is 40% larger than Earth and takes 8.5 days to orbit its sun. Francisco Pozuelos, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and one of the main co-authors of the paper, said in a news release that the planet could be suitable to life despite being a mere 3.7 million miles from its sun. Earth, by comparison, is located over 93 million miles away from our sun. "Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than that of Mercury around our Sun, the amount of stellar irradiation it receives is still low, and could allow the presence of liquid water on the planet's surface, provided it has a sufficient atmosphere," Pozuelos said. "This is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and has a surface temperature half that of our star."

Lenovo is finally selling AR glasses for consumers with the recently-announced Lenovo Glasses T1, which Ars Technica's Scharon Harding got to demo. Here's an excerpt from her report: With their Micro OLED displays and required tether to Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS devices, they bring some notable features to a space that has piqued industry-wide interest but is still likely far from becoming ubiquitous. The early version of the T1 I tried had limited features; I was mostly only able to view a homepage with basic menu options and a desktop with icons for apps, like web browsing. Although the glasses weren't ready for me to watch a movie or hop around apps, I was impressed at how clear text and menu items were. This was in a sunny room with exceedingly tall windows. Even when facing sunlight, the few colors on display seemed vibrant and the text legible.

Lenovo specs the displays with 10,000:1 contrast and 1920x1080 pixels per eye. The glasses are also TUV-certified for low blue light and flicker reduction, according to Lenovo. Much more time is needed to explore and challenge the Micro OLED displays before I pass final judgment. But the combination of smaller pixels and, from what I saw thus far, strong colors, should accommodate screens so close to the eyes. More broadly speaking, brightness can be a concern with OLED technologies, but the small demo I saw fared well in a sun-flushed room.

I used the Glasses T1 while it was connected to an Android smartphone via its USB-C cable, but it's also supposed to work with PCs, macOS devices, and, via an adapter sold separately, iPhones. [...] With no processor or battery, it's easier for the glasses to stay trim. There are also no sensors or cameras like the Lenovo ThinkReality A3, announced last year, has. Other T1 features include a pair of speakers (one near each temple) and the ability to add prescription lenses. [...] The Glasses T1 are expected to be available in select markets in 2023 after debuting in China (as the Lenovo Yoga Glasses) this year. Lenovo didn't set a price, but I was told it's hoping to keep the glasses under $500.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. "I won first place," a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. Sincarnate's name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair's website (PDF), he won in the digital art category with a work called "Theatre D'opera Spatial." The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint "Theatre D'opera Spatial," AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. "TL;DR -- Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize," artist Genel Jumalon said in a viral tweet about Allen's win. "Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty." "We're watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes," a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. "If creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?" "I knew this would be controversial," Allen said in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday. "How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?"

He added: "I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI," he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.

"What if we looked at it from the other extreme, what if an artist made a wildly difficult and complicated series of restraints in order to create a piece, say, they made their art while hanging upside-down and being whipped while painting," he said. "Should this artist's work be evaluated differently than another artist that created the same piece 'normally'? I know what will become of this in the end, they are simply going to create an 'artificial intelligence art' category I imagine for things like this."

Among the Inflation Reduction Act's little-noticed yet potentially game-changing provisions: a big incentive for "smart glass," which can make buildings significantly more energy efficient. From a report: Buildings account for 27% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, by one estimate. While eco-friendly buildings aren't as sexy or exciting as electric cars, anything that makes them greener is a big win for hitting climate goals. The IRA, which President Biden signed into law earlier this month, includes a 30% smart glass tax credit. While it didn't get much mainstream attention, that credit stands to increase adoption by reducing the effective cost of retrofitting old buildings or using smart glass in new construction.

Smart glass, also called "dynamic glass" or "electrochromic glass," differs from regular glass in that its tint level can be adjusted on demand -- think Transitions glasses, but for buildings. Smart glass contains thin layers of metal oxide. When small amounts of electricity are applied to those layers, ions move between them, changing the glass' tint level. When the summer sun is hitting the side of a building, the tint level can be increased, allowing visible light to pass but blocking some solar radiation -- thereby reducing incoming heat. Conversely, the tint can be decreased in colder seasons, allowing more natural heat to pass through. Smart glass can help reduce a building's heating or cooling energy needs by about 20%, per a U.S. Department of Energy estimate. Plus, if lots of buildings in a single city adopt smart glass, it can reduce the peak load on the local electric grid during times of heavy use.

Long-time Slashdot reader Dr_Ish writes: It is not too common for the world of academic philosophy to be changed by a new discovery, or innovation. Perhaps the last time this happened in a major way can be traced back to Turing's famous (1950) "Computational Machinery and Intelligence" paper "Mind," where Turing proposed that computational systems could exhibit mind-like properties. However, it appears to be in the process of happening again.

In a series of recent papers and a book that was published last week, philosopher Prof. Paco Calvo from the University of Murcia, has made a compelling case that plants exhibit cognitive properties, such as memory, planning, intelligence and perhaps even numerical abilities... His book, Calvo, P. with Lawrence, N. "Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence was published in the UK last week. It will appear in North America in March next year.
From the Guardian's review of the book: Calvo writes that intelligence is "not quite as special as we like to think". He argues that it's time to accept that other organisms, even drastically different ones, may be capable of it....

In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants' remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using "chemical talk", a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds.... Other studies show that some plants retain a memory of where the sun will rise, in order to turn their leaves towards the first rays. They store this knowledge — an internal model of what the sun is going to do — for several days, even when kept in total darkness. The conclusion must be that they constantly collect information, processing and retaining it in order to "make predictions, learn, and even plan ahead".

According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT describe new aluminum-sulfur batteries that are made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials and can be charged in less than a minute. "The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee," reports MIT News. The caveat with this new kind of battery is that it requires a variety of molten salts that need to be "close to the boiling point of water." From the report: In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F). Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. The chloro-aluminate salt they chose "essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging," Sadoway says. "We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting."

What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.

For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.

If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.

After revealing just 23 named titles back in July, Friday morning Sega announced the full lineup of 60 games that will be included on the limited supply of US Sega Genesis Mini 2 units starting on October 27. From a report: Beyond the usual retro suspects, though, that list includes a couple of games that have never been released in any form, as well as several fresh arcade ports and Genesis titles sporting brand-new features for their plug-and-play re-release. Those unreleased retro games include Devi & Pii, a title designed by Sonic 3 developer Takashi Iizuka. The "paddle-style game" looks like something of a cross between Arkanoid and Twinkle Star Sprites, with one or two players shifting back and forth to juggle angels and avoid bouncing devils. The Genesis Mini 2 will also see the worldwide premier of Star Mobile, a game completed in 1992 by little-known journeyman developer Mindware but never actually released. The puzzle-heavy gameplay involves stacking stars on a carefully balanced mobile in a way that reminds us of the tabletop game Topple.

Besides those two never-before-seen titles, the Genesis Mini 2 features a few Sega arcade games that are being "ported" to Genesis-level hardware for the first time. These include:
Fantasy Zone: The cute-and-cuddly side-scrolling shooter gets ported to the Genesis by the same team that ported Darius on the first Genesis Mini, with a brand-new Easy Mode that wasn't in the arcades.
Space Harrier and Space Harrier II: While the sequel was already technically native to the Genesis, these new ports use "modern technology" to provide a much smoother sprite scaling function than was previously possible on 16-bit hardware (it's unclear if these new ROMs could run on a standard Genesis).
Spatter: A little-known 1984 maze game featuring a clown on a bouncing tricycle.
Super Locomotive: A 1982 train game focused on switching tracks to avoid collisions.
VS Puyo Puyo Sun: A competitive two-player-exclusive "demake" of the third game in the popular color-matching puzzle series, with "new rules not found in the original version."

One of the University of Michigan Library's most prized possessions, which appeared to be a Galileo manuscript, is now thought to be the work of a 20th-century forger. From a report: Galileo Galilei was peering through a new telescope in 1610 when he noticed something strange: several bright objects flickering around the planet Jupiter that seemed to change positions nightly. His discovery, of moons orbiting Jupiter, was a major crack in the notion, widely held since antiquity, that everything in the universe revolved around the Earth. The finding, which was condemned by the Catholic Church, helped prove the theory of a sun-centered solar system. For decades the University of Michigan Library has prized a manuscript related to the discovery, describing it as "one of the great treasures" in its collection. At the top is the draft of a letter signed by Galileo describing the new telescope, and on the bottom are sketches plotting the positions of the moons around Jupiter -- "the first observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than the earth," the library described it.

At least it would be if it were authentic. After Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University, uncovered evidence suggesting the manuscript was a fake, the library investigated and determined that he was right: The university said Wednesday it had concluded that its treasured manuscript "is in fact a 20th-century forgery." "It was pretty gut-wrenching when we first learned our Galileo was not actually a Galileo," Donna L. Hayward, the interim dean of the university's libraries, said in an interview. But since the purpose of any library is to expand knowledge, she said, the university had decided to be forthright about its findings and publicly announce the forgery. "To sweep it under the rug is counter to what we stand for."

Academics and pharmaceutical companies hope that technology based on human cells will help them phase mice and monkeys out of their labs. From a report: The umbrella term for the new field is microphysiological systems or MPS, which includes tumoroids, organoids and organs-on-a-chip. Organoids are grown from stem cells to create 3D tissue in a dish resembling miniature human organs; heart organoids beat like the real thing, for example. Organs-on-a-chip are plastic blocks lined with stem cells and a circuit that stimulates the mechanics of an organ. "We need to move away from animals in a systematic way," says Salim Abdool Karim, South Africa's leading infectious disease expert. "Thatâ...âinvolves regulators being given the data to show that non-animal biological systems will give us compatible, if not better, information." Nathalie Brandenburg co-founded Swiss start-up Sun Bioscience in 2016 to create standard versions of organoids, which makes it easier to trust that results are comparable, and convince scientists and regulators to use them. "When we started we had to tell people what organoids were," she says, referring to the early stage of her research journey.

In the past two years, and particularly as scientists emerged from lockdowns -- when many had time to read up on the technology -- demand from large pharmaceutical companies for Sun's products has soared, she says. Companies are becoming more interested in reducing their reliance on animals for ethical reasons, says Arron Tolley, chief executive of Aptamer Group, which creates artificial antibodies for use in diagnostics and drugs. "People are becoming more responsible now, from a corporate governance point of view, and looking to remove animal testing when necessary," he says. Using larger animals, such as monkeys, is particularly problematic, Tolley adds. "The bigger and cuter they get, the more people are aware of the impact." Rare diseases are especially fertile ground for models based on human tissues, says James Hickman, chief scientist at Hesperos, an organ-on-a-chip company based in Florida. "There are 7,000 rare diseases and only 400 are being actively researched because there are no animal models," Hickman says. "We're not just talking about replacing animals or reducing animals, these systems fill a void where animal models don't exist."

Version 9.3 of NetBSD is here, able to run on very low-end systems and with that authentic early-1990s experience. The Register reports: Version 9.3 comes some 15 months after NetBSD 9.2 and boasts new and updated drivers, improved hardware support, including for some recent AMD and Intel processors, and better handling of suspend and resume. The next sentence in the release announcement, though, might give some readers pause: "Support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga." This is your clue that we are in a rather different territory from run-of-the-mill PC operating systems here. A notable improvement in NetBSD 9.3 is being able to run a graphical desktop on an Amiga. This is a 2022 operating system that can run on late-1980s hardware, and there are not many of those around.

NetBSD supports eight "tier I" architectures: 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and Arm, plus MIPS, PowerPC, Sun UltraSPARC, and the Xen hypervisor. Alongside those, there are no less than 49 "tier II" supported architectures, which are not as complete and not everything works -- although almost all of them are on version 9.3 except for the version for original Acorn computers with 32-bit Arm CPUs, which is still only on NetBSD 8.1. There's also a "tier III" for ports which are on "life support" so there may be a risk Archimedes support could drop to that. This is an OS that can run on 680x0 hardware, DEC VAX minicomputers and workstations, and Sun 2, 3, and 32-bit SPARC boxes. In other words, it reaches back as far as some 1970s hardware. Let this govern your expectations. For instance, in VirtualBox, if you tell it you want to create a NetBSD guest, it disables SMP support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A photo tweeted by a famous French physicist supposedly of Proxima Centauri by the James Webb Space Telescope was actually a slice of chorizo. Etienne Klein, research director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission posted the photo last week, claiming it showed the closest star to the sun. "This level of detail," Klein wrote. "A new world is revealed day after day."

But a few days later, Klein revealed that the photo he tweeted was not the work of the world's most powerful space telescope, as he had in fact tweeted a slice of chorizo sausage. "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth," he said after apologizing for tricking so many people. "Like an idiot, I got screwed," tweeted one French user. "Same," replied another, "the source was so credible" Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online, adding that "I also think that if I hadn't said it was a James Webb photo, it wouldn't have been so successful."

With the help of SpaceX and a Falcon 9 rocket, South Korea launched its first mission to the moon. "The successful launch of Danuri, officially known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, takes the country beyond Earth's orbit for the first time," reports Nature. From the report: Danuri should arrive at its destination around mid-December. Its trajectory means it will take longer than most past missions to the Moon, which typically arrived in days, but will require minimal fuel. About an hour after lift-off, the spacecraft detached from the Falcon 9 rocket on which it launched. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute's control centre in Daejeon then took command and made contact with the spacecraft.

The bulk of the mission's scientific observations will take place once Danuri reaches the Moon, which it will orbit for a year at 100 kilometres above the lunar surface. KGRS has a broader energy range than previous y-ray detectors sent to the Moon, and scientists hope that it will create the clearest maps yet of the distribution of elements including iron, titanium, uranium and thorium. [...] [T]he spectrometer is also sensitive enough to detect hydrogen, which can be used to infer the presence of water on the surface, and create a water-resource map of the entire Moon. Previous probes have struggled to map the presence of water beyond the poles, where it is relatively more abundant [...].

KMAG will take precise measurements of the magnetic field on the surface. It will also study electric currents induced by the magnetic field of the solar wind, which streams out into space from the Sun, says Garrick-Bethell, who is part of the instrument's science team. Studying how these currents pass through the Moon could reveal what the Moon is made of deep inside. To do this, Danuri will make use of simultaneous measurements by two NASA probes currently circling the Moon, says Garrick-Bethell. This "will make a beautiful experiment that was only briefly attempted in the Apollo era, but not over the entire Moon," he says. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Nathaniel Scharping writes via Science Magazine: On 15 January, Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted under the sea, rocking the South Pacific nation and sending tsunamis racing around the world. The eruption was the most powerful ever recorded, causing an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe four times, and sending a plume of debris more than 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. But it didn't stop there. The ash and gasses punching into the sky also shot billions of kilograms of water into the atmosphere, a new study concludes. That water will likely remain there for years, where it could eat away at the ozone layer and perhaps even warm Earth.

In all, the plume shot approximately 146 billion kilograms of water into Earth's stratosphere, an arid layer of the atmosphere that begins several miles above sea level, the authors report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That's equivalent to about 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, or about 10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere, [study co-author and JPL atmospheric scientist Luis Millan] says. Other volcanoes have added measurable amounts of water vapor to Earth's atmosphere, he says, but the scale this time was unprecedented. That's likely because of the eruption's magnitude and underwater location, he says. The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more, he says.

Big volcanic eruptions often cool the climate, because the sulfur dioxide they release forms compounds that reflect incoming sunlight. But with so much water vapor flung aloft, the Tonga eruption could have a different impact. Water absorbs incoming energy from the Sun, making it a potent greenhouse gas. And the sulfur dioxide will dissipate in just a few years whereas the water will likely stick around for at least 5 years -- and potentially longer Millan thinks. That could make Earth warmer for years and accelerate the warming from greenhouse gasses, [says Matthew Toohey, a physicist who focuses on climate modeling and the effects of volcanic eruptions at the University of Saskatchewan and was not involved with the work]. "We'll kind of just jump forward by a few years." But the actual effects on climate will likely take time to understand [...]. High above Earth, the water will likely react with other chemicals, potentially degrading the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light, and even changing the circulation of air currents that govern weather patterns.

What if we glimpsed alien life for the first time by peering through a natural telescope made by the Sun's gravity? This wild idea, known as a solar gravitational lens (SGL) mission, may sound like an Einsteinian fever dream, but scientists have now found that it is "feasible with technologies that are either extant or in active development," according to a new study. Motherboard reports: Researchers led by Henry Helvajian, senior scientist in the Physical Sciences Laboratories at the nonprofit research center The Aerospace Corporation, have now shared the initial results of this ongoing NIAC study on the preprint server arxiv, which have not been peer-reviewed. Though the team cautioned that the mission would need to overcome several technical challenges, it could ultimately answer one of humanity's most fundamental questions: Are we alone in the universe?

"The SGL offers capabilities that are unmatched by any planned or conceivable optical instrument," according to the study, which was co-authored by Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the NIAC mission concept. "With its unique optical properties, the SGL can be used to obtain detailed, high resolution images of Earth-like exoplanets as far as 100 light years from Earth, with measurement durations lasting months, or at most a few years." "Of particular interest is the possibility of using the SGL to obtain images of high spatial and spectral resolution of a yet-to-be-identified, potentially life-bearing exoplanet in another solar system in our Galactic neighborhood," the researchers added. "The direct high-resolution images of an exoplanet obtained with the SGL could lead to insight on the on-going biological processes on the target exoplanet and find signs of habitability."

The focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens is located all the way out in interstellar space, some 550 and 900 times the distance that Earth orbits our star, which is much farther than any spacecraft has ventured beyond our planet. Helvajian and his colleagues envision their mission as consisting of a one-meter telescope that is accompanied by a sunshade and propelled by solar sails that produce thrust by capturing solar radiation, in a somewhat analogous fashion to wind-propelled sails. Even if they were able to overcome the technical hurdles involved with this concept -- which include the development of more reliable solar sails and long-duration navigation and communications systems -- the team estimated that it would take at least 25 to 30 years for a spacecraft to reach this far-flung location, in the best case scenario. That said, if a telescope were able to spot alien life, arguably the biggest breakthrough in science, it would be well worth the long wait.

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

"T2 SDE is not just a regular Linux distribution," reads the announcement. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit (others might even name it Meta Distribution). T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

Slashdot reader ReneR writes: The T2 project released a major milestone update, shipping full support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. Support for cross compiling was further improved to also cover Rust, Ada, ObjC, Fortran, and Go!

This is also the first major release where an AI powered package update bot named 'data' contributed more changes than human contributors combined! [Data: 164, humans: 141]

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support as well as supporting nearly all existing CPU architectures: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, spare, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 for a wide use in Embedded systems. The project also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi Octane and Sun workstations as well as state of the art ARM64, RISCV64 as well as AMD64 for regular cloud, server, or simply enthusiast workstation use.

Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected two new extrasolar planets. Phys.Org reports: The newfound alien worlds, designated TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b, are the size of Jupiter but about three times more massive than the solar system's biggest planet. [...] TOI-5152 b has a radius of about 1.07 Jupiter radii and is approximately three times more massive than Jupiter. It orbits its parent star every 54.19 days, at a distance of some 0.31 AU from it. The planet's equilibrium temperature was measured to be 688 K. The host TOI-5152 is a G1-type star nearly two times larger than the sun, located about 1,200 light years away from the Earth. Its age is estimated to be between 1.4 and 6.8 billion years.

TOI-5153 b has a mass of 3.26 Jupiter masses, while its radius was estimated to be 1.06 Jupiter radii. The orbital period of this exoplanet was measured to be 20.33 days and its distance to the host is nearly 0.16 AU. The astronomers calculated that the equilibrium temperature of TOI-5153 b is at a level of 906 K. The parent star is of spectral type F8. It is about 40% larger than the sun and is assumed to be 5.4 billion years old. The distance to this planetary system is about 1,270 light years. Therefore, TOI-5152 b and TOI-5153 b are warm and massive Jupiter-sized alien worlds. The astronomers noted that they are both metal-enriched and their heavy element content is consistent with the mass-metallicity relation of gas giants. Given that the two planets orbit moderately bright stars, the authors of the paper added that they are ideal targets for additional observations. The findings have been reported on the arXiv pre-print repository.

A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a "very exciting discovery." The Guardian reports: Though it is not the first contender, a researcher from the University of Sheffield says this black hole is "the first to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy." The researchers had been looking for black hole binary systems for more than two years before finding what has become known as VFTS243. Stellar-mass black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. In a system of two stars revolving around each other, this process leaves behind a black hole in orbit with a luminous companion star.

The newly discovered dormant black hole is at least nine times the mass of the Earth's Sun, and orbits a hot blue star weighing 25 times as much as the Sun. It has been observed in a neighboring galaxy by a team of international scientists; their study -- published in Nature Astronomy -- suggests that the star that gave rise to VFTS243 vanished without any sign of an associated supernova explosion. Confirming the likelihood of what he termed a "direct-collapse scenario," Paul Crowther, professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield, believes this has "enormous implications for the origin of black hole mergers in the cosmos."

Microsoft is shifting to a new engineering schedule for Windows which will see the company return to a more traditional three-year release cycle for major versions of the Windows client, while simultaneously increasing the output of new features shipping to the current version of Windows on the market. Zac Bowden writes via Windows Central: The news comes just a year after the company announced it was moving to a yearly release cadence for new versions of Windows. According to my sources, Microsoft now intends to ship "major" versions of the Windows client every three years, with the next release currently scheduled for 2024, three years after Windows 11 shipped in 2021. This means that the originally planned 2023 client release of Windows (codenamed Sun Valley 3) has been scrapped, but that's not the end of the story. I'm told that with the move to this new development schedule, Microsoft is also planning to increase the output of new features rolling out to users on the latest version of Windows.

Starting with Windows 11 version 22H2 (Sun Valley 2), Microsoft is kicking off a new "Moments" engineering effort which is designed to allow the company to rollout new features and experiences at key points throughout the year, outside of major OS releases. I hear the company intends to ship new features to the in-market version of Windows every few months, up to four times a year, starting in 2023. Microsoft has already tested this system with the rollout of the Taskbar weather button on Windows 11 earlier this year. That same approach will be used for these Moments, where the company will group together a handful of new features that have been in testing with Insiders and roll them out to everyone on top the latest shipping release of Windows. Many of the features that were planned for the now-scrapped Sun Valley 3 client release will ship as part of one of these Moments on top of Sun Valley 2, instead of in a dedicated new release of the Windows client in the fall of 2023.