2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news?

No. One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It's the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing the top layer of water toward Asia, causing deeper, colder waters to rush to the surface to fill the void. This in turn influences the atmosphere, for instance changing the jet stream above the United States and leading to more hurricanes in the Atlantic. The sea itself cools things off by absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have had an additional influence, but not in the way you might think. As the world locked down in 2020, fewer emissions went into the sky, including aerosols that typically reflect some of the sun's energy back into space. "If you take them away, you make the air cleaner, then that's a slight warming impact on the climate," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a Thursday press conference announcing the findings. But as economic activity ramped back up in 2021, so did aerosol pollution, contributing again to that cooling effect. The 2021 temperature drop "may be possibly due to a resumption of activity that produces aerosols in the atmosphere," Schmidt said...

Today's findings are all the more alarming precisely because 2021 managed to overcome these cooling effects and still tally the sixth-highest temperature. And while global temperatures were cooler in 2021 than the year before, last year 1.8 billion people lived in places that experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded, according to a report released today by Berkeley Earth. This includes Asian countries like China and North and South Korea, African nations like Nigeria and Liberia, and in the Middle East places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. "We talk a lot about global average temperatures, but no one lives in the global average," says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. "In fact most of the globe, two-thirds of it, is ocean, and no one lives in the ocean — or very few people at least. And land areas, on average, are warming much faster than the rest of the world...."

Last summer in western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, absurd temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit killed hundreds of people. According to Hausfather, the heat wave in Portland, Oregon, would have been effectively impossible without climate change, something like a once-every-150,000-year event.
It's a fascinating article, that looks at trouble spots like Antarctica's sea level-threatening "Doomsday Glacier" and a warming Gulf of Mexico, mapping the intensity of 2021's temperature anomalies along with trend graphs for both global temperatures and land-vs-ocean averages. It touches on how climate change is impacting weather — everything from rain and floods to wildfires and locusts — as Bridget Seegers, an oceanographer at NASA, points out that "Extremes are getting worse. People are losing their homes and their lives and air quality, because the wildfires are bad."

But Seegers somehow arrives at a positive thought. "There's just a lot going on, and I want people to also feel empowered that we understand the problem. It's just this other issue of deciding to take collective action....

"There's a lot of reasons for optimism. We're in charge. This would be a lot worse if we're like, 'Oh, it's warming because we're heading toward the sun, and we can't stop it.'"

(Thanks to Slashdot reader Sanja Pantic for sharing the article!)

Astronomers say they have found a second plausible candidate for a moon beyond our solar system, an exomoon, orbiting a world nearly 6,000 light-years from Earth. Scientific American reports: Called Kepler-1708 b-i, the moon appears to be a gas-dominated object, slightly smaller than Neptune, orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet around a sunlike star -- an unusual but not wholly unprecedented planet-moon configuration. The findings appear in Nature Astronomy. Confirming or refuting the result may not be immediately possible, but given the expected abundance of moons in our galaxy and beyond, it could further herald the tentative beginnings of an exciting new era of extrasolar astronomy -- one focused not on alien planets but on the natural satellites that orbit them and the possibilities of life therein.

Kepler-1708 b-i's existence was first hinted at in 2018, during an examination of archival data by David Kipping of Columbia University, one of the discoverers of Kepler-1625 b-i, and his colleagues. The team analyzed transit data from NASA's Kepler space telescope of 70 so-called cool giants -- gas giants, such as Jupiter and Saturn, that orbit relatively far from their stars, with years consisting of more than 400 Earth days. The team looked for signs of transiting exomoons orbiting these worlds, seeking additional dips in light from any shadowy lunar companions. Then the researchers spent the next few years killing their darlings, vetting one potential exomoon candidate after another and finding each better explained by other phenomena -- with a single exception: Kepler-1708 b-i. "It's a moon candidate we can't kill," Kipping says. "For four years we've tried to prove this thing was bogus. It passed every test we can imagine."

The magnitude of the relevant smaller, additional dip in light points to the existence of a moon about 2.6 times the size of Earth. The nature of the transit method means that only the radius of worlds can be directly gleaned, not their mass. But this one's size suggests a gas giant of some sort. "It's probably in the 'mini Neptune' category," Kipping says, referring to a type of world that, despite not existing in our solar system, is present in abundance around other stars. The planet this putative mini Neptune moon orbits, the Jupiter-sized Kepler-1708 b, completes an orbit of its star every 737 days at a distance 1.6 times that between Earth and the sun. Presuming the candidate is genuinely a moon, it would orbit the planet once every 4.6 Earth days, at a distance of more than 740,000 kilometers -- nearly twice the distance our own moon's orbit around Earth. The fact that only this single candidate emerged from the analysis of 70 cool giants could suggest that large gaseous moons are "not super common" in the cosmos [...].

"Mirror, mirror...is deployed," NASA tweeted Saturday, confirming that the James Webb telescope "has taken on its final form. For the next ~6 months, the space telescope will cool down, calibrate its instruments, and prepare to #UnfoldTheUniverse."

With a diameter of 21.3 feet, the telescope's mirror is the largest mirror ever launched into space — a joint effort with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency. "Good news keep coming," the ESA tweeted yesterday. " Mike Menzel, NASA Webb Mission Systems Engineer said yesterday in press brief that Webb might have 'quite a bit of fuel margin... Roughly speaking, it's around 20 years of propellant', adding that's still to be determined."

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes that "For years naysayers have confidently declared that the numerous automated operations necessary to fully deploy the James Webb Space Telescope were going to guarantee its failure. Today they've been proven wrong."

From NASA.gov: "Today, NASA achieved another engineering milestone decades in the making. While the journey is not complete, I join the Webb team in breathing a little easier and imagining the future breakthroughs bound to inspire the world," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The James Webb Space Telescope is an unprecedented mission that is on the precipice of seeing the light from the first galaxies and discovering the mysteries of our universe. Each feat already achieved and future accomplishment is a testament to the thousands of innovators who poured their life's passion into this mission...."

The world's largest and most complex space science telescope will now begin moving its 18 primary mirror segments to align the telescope optics. The ground team will command 126 actuators on the backsides of the segments to flex each mirror — an alignment that will take months to complete. Then the team will calibrate the science instruments prior to delivering Webb's first images this summer.

"I am so proud of the team — spanning continents and decades — that delivered this first-of-its kind achievement," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate in NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Webb's successful deployment exemplifies the best of what NASA has to offer: the willingness to attempt bold and challenging things in the name of discoveries still unknown."

Soon, Webb will also undergo a third mid-course correction burn — one of three planned to place the telescope precisely in orbit around the second Lagrange point, commonly known as L2, nearly 1 million miles from Earth. This is Webb's final orbital position, where its sunshield will protect it from light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon that could interfere with observations of infrared light. Webb is designed to peer back over 13.5 billion years to capture infrared light from celestial objects, with much higher resolution than ever before, and to study our own solar system as well as distant worlds.

"The successful completion of all of the Webb Space Telescope's deployments is historic," said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb program director at NASA Headquarters. "This is the first time a NASA-led mission has ever attempted to complete a complex sequence to unfold an observatory in space — a remarkable feat for our team, NASA, and the world."
Saturday the Canadian Space Agency tweeted "Wow.... Congratulations to everyone involved. We can't wait to see what the telescope has in store for the international astronomy community!"

Right now, NASA is providing live coverage for the conclusion of the James Webb Space Telescope's major spacecraft deployments. NASA offered this description of the event earlier this week: Beginning no earlier than 9 a.m. EST, NASA will air live coverage of the final hours of Webb's major deployments. After the live broadcast concludes, at approximately 1:30 p.m. [EST], NASA will hold a media briefing. Both the broadcast and media briefing will air live on NASA TV, the NASA app, and the agency's website.

As the final step in the observatory's major deployments, the Webb team plans to unfold the second of two primary mirror wings. When this step is complete, Webb will have finished its unprecedented process of unfolding in space to prepare for science operations....
SlashGear reports: Consisting of 18 hexagonal, gold-plated segments, the mirror is one of the telescope's most visually striking components. The primary mirror needs to be large as this is directly related to how much light the telescope can detect, which makes it more accurate (via NASA). James Webb's mirror is 6.5 meters (21ft) across, which is the largest ever launched into space. Compared to the 2.4-meter (7.8ft) mirror used on James Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, this big mirror will help the telescope to see out further into space.

Engineers couldn't just build a 6.5-meter (21ft) mirror like Hubble's, though, because it would be too large and too heavy to launch. Instead, they built the James Webb mirror in segments made from beryllium, which is both lightweight and strong. These segments fold in on themselves to fit into the rocket, and now it is time for them to unfold into their final configuration.
"Once fully operational, Webb will explore every phase of cosmic history," NASA announced, "from within the solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between. Webb will reveal new and unexpected discoveries and help humanity understand the origins of the universe and our place in it."

SlashGear adds that "Having left Earth's atmosphere and traveled over 250,000 miles away from our planet, it is now more than 70% of its way to its final orbit around the sun..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: Astronomers have long thought it takes millions of years for the seeds of stars like the Sun to come together. Clouds of mostly hydrogen gas coalesce under gravity into prestellar cores dense enough to collapse and spark nuclear fusion, while magnetic forces hold matter in place and slow down the process. But observations using the world's largest radio telescope are casting doubt on this long gestational period. Researchers have zoomed in on a prestellar core in a giant gas cloud -- a nursery for hundreds of baby stars -- and found the tiny embryo may be forming 10 times faster than thought, thanks to weak magnetic fields. "If this is proven to be the case in other gas clouds, it will be revolutionary for the star formation community," says Paola Caselli from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who was not involved with the research.

Studying star birth and the tug of war between gravity and magnetic forces has been a challenge because the magnetic fields can be 100,000 times weaker than Earth's. The only direct way to detect them comes from a phenomenon called the Zeeman effect, in which the magnetic fields cause so-called spectral lines to split in a way that depends on the strength of the field. These spectral lines are bright or dark patterns where atoms or molecules emit or absorb specific wavelengths of light. For gas clouds, the Zeeman splitting occurs in radio wavelengths, so radio telescopes are needed. And the dishes must be big in order to zoom in on a small region of space and reveal such a subtle effect. Previously, researchers had used Puerto Rico's Arecibo radio telescope -- which collapsed in 2020 -- to study Lynds 1544, a relatively isolated stellar embryo within the Taurus Molecular Cloud, just 450 light-years away from Earth. They measured the magnetic fields in the wispy layers of gas far out from the core, where magnetic forces dominated over gravity. They also analyzed the stronger fields inside the core, where gravity nevertheless dominated because the core is 10,000 times denser than the outer layer, says Richard Crutcher, a radio astronomer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. What was missing was an examination of the intermediate region between the core and the outer layer. That has now come into focus with a new tracer of the Zeeman effect -- a particular hydrogen absorption line -- detected by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a giant dish built inside a natural basin in southwestern China.

In a study published today in Nature, researchers report a magnetic field strength of 4 microgauss -- no stronger than in the outer layer. "If the standard theory worked, the magnetic field needs to be much stronger to resist a 100-fold increase in cloud density. That didn't happen," says Di Li, the chief scientist of FAST who led the study. "The paper basically says that gravity wins in the cloud: That's where stars start to form, not in the dense core," Caselli adds. "That's a very big statement." The finding implies that a gas cloud could evolve into a stellar embryo 10 times quicker than previously thought, says lead author Tao-Chung Ching of the Chinese Academy of Sciences's National Astronomical Observatories. Li says he wants to study other molecular clouds to see whether the lessons from Lynds 1544 apply more generally.

New submitter GFS666 shares a report from Live Science: We may soon be able to test one of Stephen Hawking's most controversial theories, new research suggests. In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most matter in the cosmos, may be made of black holes formed in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Now, three astronomers have developed a theory that explains not only the existence of dark matter, but also the appearance of the largest black holes in the universe. "What I find personally super exciting about this idea is how it elegantly unifies the two really challenging problems that I work on -- that of probing the nature of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes -- and resolves them in one fell swoop," study co-author Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University, said in a statement. What's more, several new instruments -- including the James Webb Space Telescope that just launched -- could produce data needed to finally assess Hawking's famous notion.

In the latest research, Natarajan, Nico Cappelluti at the University of Miami and Gunther Hasinger at the European Space Agency took a deep dive into the theory of primordial black holes, exploring how they might explain the dark matter and possibly resolve other cosmological challenges. To pass current observational tests, primordial black holes have to be within a certain mass range. In the new work, the researchers assumed that the primordial black holes had a mass of around 1.4 times the mass of the sun. They constructed a model of the universe that replaced all the dark matter with these fairly light black holes, and then they looked for observational clues that could validate (or rule out) the model.

The team found that primordial black holes could play a major role in the universe by seeding the first stars, the first galaxies and the first supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Observations indicate that stars, galaxies and SMBHs appear very quickly in cosmological history, perhaps too quickly to be accounted for by the processes of formation and growth that we observe in the present-day universe. "Primordial black holes, if they do exist, could well be the seeds from which all supermassive black holes form, including the one at the center of the Milky Way," Natarajan said. And the theory is simple and doesn't require a zoo of new particles to explain dark matter. "Our study shows that without introducing new particles or new physics, we can solve mysteries of modern cosmology from the nature of dark matter itself to the origin of supermassive black holes," Cappelluti said in the statement. The model could be tested relatively soon, the report says. "The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched Christmas Day after years of delays, is specifically designed to answer questions about the origins of stars and galaxies. And the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, especially the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), is poised to reveal much more about black holes, including primordial ones if they exist."

"On Tuesday morning, all five layers of the James Webb Space Telescope were fully locked into place," writes Slashdot reader quonset. The BBC reports: There were many who doubted the wisdom of a design that included so many motors, gears, pulleys and cables. But years of testing on full-scale and sub-scale models paid dividends as controllers first separated the shield's different layers and then tensioned them. The fifth and final membrane was locked into place at 16:58 GMT. "The unfurling and securing of the sun shield is part of what NASA refers to as '29 days on the edge,' writes quonset, citing an article from CNN. "During the 29 days, Webb will set up shop, unfurling its giant gold mirror and the protective tennis court-size sunshield. This process involves thousands of parts that must function harmoniously, in the right sequence. Fortunately, each step can be controlled from the ground in case there are issues."

"The next step is the unboxing of the mirror which had to be folded to fit inside the nose cone of the rocket for launch. If all goes well, by the end of the weekend, the mirror will be in place and ready for testing before full operations begin."

"Since joining NASA in 1980, Jim Green has seen it all," writes the New York Times. He has helped the space agency understand Earth's magnetic field, explore the outer solar system and search for life on Mars. As the new year arrived on Saturday, he bade farewell to the agency.

Over the past four decades, which includes 12 years as the director of NASA's planetary science division and the last three years as its chief scientist, he has shaped much of NASA's scientific inquiry, overseeing missions across the solar system and contributing to more than 100 scientific papers across a range of topics... One of Dr. Green's most recent significant proposals has been a scale for verifying the detection of alien life, called the "confidence of life detection," or CoLD, scale. [Green says scientists have to "stop screwing around with just crying wolf."]
Green has also published research suggesting it's possible to terraform Mars with a giant magnetic shield blocking the sun (to stop it from stripping the Mars atmosphere and creating habitable temperatures).

"Yeah, it's doable," he explains to the Times:

"Stop the stripping, and the pressure is going to increase. Mars is going to start terraforming itself. That's what we want: the planet to participate in this any way it can. When the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up... If you didn't need a spacesuit, you could have much more flexibility and mobility. The higher temperature and pressure enable you to begin the process of growing plants in the soils.

"There are several scenarios on how to do the magnetic shield. I'm trying to get a paper out I've been working on for about two years. It's not going to be well received. The planetary community does not like the idea of terraforming anything.

"But you know. I think we can change Venus, too, with a physical shield that reflects light. We create a shield, and the whole temperature starts going down."

Last night we asked what books you'd enjoyed reading this year.

Here's how Bill Gates had answered the same question on his personal blog Gates Notes: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science fiction. Paul Allen and I would spend countless hours discussing Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy. I read every book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein. (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite.) There was something so thrilling to me about these stories that pushed the limits of what was possible.

As I got older, I started reading a lot more non-fiction. I was still interested in books that explored the implications of innovation, but it felt more important to learn something about our real world along the way. Lately, though, I've found myself drawn back to the kinds of books I would've loved as a kid.

My holiday reading list this year includes two terrific science fiction stories. One takes place nearly 12 light-years away from our sun, and the other is set right here in the United States — but both made me think about how people can use technology to respond to challenges. I've also included a pair of non-fiction books about cutting-edge science and a novel that made me look at one of history's most famous figures in a new light.

I read a lot of great books this year — including John Doerr's latest about climate change — but these were some of my favorites...
Gates' picks include a dystopian science fiction novel by nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun) and Project Hail Mary. ("It requires a leap of faith, but it's got a lot of science in it...") The nonfiction titles included Walter Isaacson's book about CRISPR, The Code Breaker and Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains.

Gates reveals his recommendations in a fanciful video where Christmas-y window displays include icons from his recommended books — including William Shakespeare.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from MIT News: Aerospace engineers at MIT are testing a new concept for a hovering rover that levitates by harnessing the moon's natural charge. Because they lack an atmosphere, the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids can build up an electric field through direct exposure to the sun and surrounding plasma. On the moon, this surface charge is strong enough to levitate dust more than 1 meter above the ground, much the way static electricity can cause a person's hair to stand on end. Engineers at NASA and elsewhere have recently proposed harnessing this natural surface charge to levitate a glider with wings made of Mylar, a material that naturally holds the same charge as surfaces on airless bodies. They reasoned that the similarly charged surfaces should repel each other, with a force that lofts the glider off the ground. But such a design would likely be limited to small asteroids, as larger planetary bodies would have a stronger, counteracting gravitational pull.

The MIT team's levitating rover could potentially get around this size limitation. The concept, which resembles a retro-style, disc-shaped flying saucer, uses tiny ion beams to both charge up the vehicle and boost the surface's natural charge. The overall effect is designed to generate a relatively large repulsive force between the vehicle and the ground, in a way that requires very little power. In an initial feasibility study, the researchers show that such an ion boost should be strong enough to levitate a small, 2-pound vehicle on the moon and large asteroids like Psyche. The team predicted that a small rover, weighing about two pounds, could achieve levitation of about one centimeter off the ground, on a large asteroid such as Psyche, using a 10-kilovolt ion source. To get a similar liftoff on the moon, the same rover would need a 50-kilovolt source. "This kind of ionic design uses very little power to generate a lot of voltage," [explains co-author Paulo Lozano]. "The power needed is so small, you could do this almost for free."

Germany is set to close almost half of its nuclear power capacity before the end of the year, putting further strain on European grids already coping with one of the worst energy crunches in the region's history. From a report: The shutdowns of Grohnde, Gundremmingen C and Brokdorf -- part of the country's nuclear phaseout -- will leave just three atomic plants, which will be taken offline by the end of 2022. Beyond the squeeze on supply, the closures remove a key source of low-carbon power in a nation where emissions are on the rise. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Germany vowed to ditch all of its reactors. At the time, the country was a leader in renewables, but the phaseout has left it more reliant on coal and lignite for electricity generation. The nation fell behind in the net-zero race after making major concessions to the coal lobby, to protesters against wind farms and to manufacturers, particularly carmakers.

"From a pure emissions perspective, it was always a questionable idea to shut down German nuclear before the plants have reached the end of their lifetime," said Hanns Koenig, head of commissioned projects at Aurora Energy Research. "It was always clear that the nuclear phaseout would need coal and gas plants to run more and therefore cause substantial extra emissions." Atomic plants are designed to generate power around the clock, providing valuable backup when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. While the shutdowns have been known about for years and are unlikely to cause a spike in prices, the removal of 4 gigawatts of baseload output highlights a dwindling reserve of buffer capacity in Germany. It's one reason why prices are higher next year: electricity for delivery in 2022 has jumped more than fivefold this year.

Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist shares an announcement from a Stanford University institute for environmental studies. "For some, visions of a future powered by clean, renewable energy are clouded by fears of blackouts driven by intermittent electricity supplies," the announcement begins.

"Those fears are misplaced, according to a new Stanford University study that analyzes grid stability under multiple scenarios in which wind, water and solar energy resources power 100% of U.S. energy needs for all purposes." "This study is the first to examine grid stability in all U.S. grid regions and many individual states after electrifying all energy and providing the electricity with only energy that is both clean and renewable," said study lead author Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford... Imagine all cars and trucks were powered with electric motors or hydrogen fuel cells, electric heat pumps replaced gas furnaces and water heaters and wind turbines and solar panels replaced coal and natural gas power plants. The study envisions those and many more transitions in place across the electricity, transportation, buildings and industrial sectors in the years 2050 and 2051...

Interconnecting larger and larger geographic regions made power supply smoother and costs lower because it upped the chances of available wind, sun and hydro power availability and reduced the need for extra wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. A significant finding of the study was that long-duration batteries were neither needed nor helpful for keeping the grid stable. Instead, grid stability could be obtained by linking together currently available batteries with storage durations of four hours or less. Linking together short-duration batteries can provide long-term storage when they are used in succession. They can also be discharged simultaneously to meet heavy peaks in demand for short periods. In other words, short-duration batteries can be used for both big peaks in demand for short periods and lower peaks for a long period or anything in-between.
Other findings:

• Cleaner air would spare about 53,200 people from pollution-related deaths every year. It would also spare millions more from pollution-related illnesses. Total estimated health costs saved each year: $700 billion.
• Building and operating a completely renewable grid may create 4.7 million long-term jobs.

• Per capita household energy costs were nearly 63% less.

• New electricity generators would occupy about 0.84% of U.S. land (versus roughly 1.3% occupied today by the fossil fuel industry).

Sixty years after NASA set the goal, and three years after its Parker Solar Probe launched, the spacecraft has become the first to "touch the sun." CNN World reports: The Parker Solar Probe has successfully flown through the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star's magnetic fields. The announcement was made at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday, and research from the solar milestone has been published in the Physical Review Letters.

The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and set out to circle closer and closer to the sun. Scientists, including the spacecraft's namesake astrophysicist Eugene Parker, want to answer fundamental questions about the solar wind that streams out from the sun, flinging energetic particles across the solar system. The sun's corona is much hotter than the actual surface of the star, and the spacecraft could provide insight about why. The corona is one million degrees Kelvin (1,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit) at its hottest point, while the surface is around 6,000 Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit).

The spacecraft has already revealed surprising finds about the sun, including the 2019 discovery of magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind called switchbacks. Now, thanks to Parker's latest close approach to the sun, the spacecraft helped scientists determine that these switchbacks originate from the solar surface. Before Parker Solar Probe's mission is done, it will have made 21 close approaches to the sun over the course of seven years. The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun's surface in 2024, closer to the star than Mercury -- the closest planet to the sun.

This year's Game Awards also saw the premiere of The Matrix Awakens, a new in-world "tech demonstrator" written by Lana Wachowski, the co-writer/director of the original Matrix trilogy and director of the upcoming sequel. It's available free on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, reports the Verge, and they also scored a sit-down video interview with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss about the new playable experience — and the new Matrix movie: Reeves also revealed that he thinks there should be a modern Matrix video game, that he's flattered by Cyberpunk 2077 players modding the game to have sex with his character, and why he thinks Facebook shouldn't co-opt the metaverse.

Apart from serving as a clever promotion vehicle for the new Matrix movie premiering December 22nd, The Matrix Awakens is designed to showcase what's possible with the next major version of Epic's Unreal Engine coming next year. It's structured as a scripted intro by Wachowski, followed by a playable car chase scene and then an open-world sandbox experience you can navigate as one of Epic's metahuman characters. A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy...

Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer "this sort of niche art form." Thanks to updates coming to Unreal Engine, which powers everything from Fortnite to special effects in Disney's The Mandalorian, developers will be able to use the same, hyper-realistic virtual assets across different experiences. It's part of Epic's goal to help build the metaverse.
Elsewhere the site writes that The Matrix Awakens "single-handedly proves next-gen graphics are within reach of Sony and Microsoft's new game consoles." It's unlike any tech demo you've ever tried before. When we said the next generation of gaming didn't actually arrive with Xbox Series X and PS5, this is the kind of push that has the potential to turn that around....

Just don't expect it to make you question your reality — the uncanny valley is still alive and well.... But from a "is it time for photorealistic video game cities?" perspective, The Matrix Awakens is seriously convincing. It's head-and-shoulders above the most photorealistic video game cities we've seen so far, including those in the Spider-Man, Grand Theft Auto and Watch Dogs series... Despite glitches and an occasionally choppy framerate, The Matrix Awakens city feels more real, thanks to Unreal Engine's incredible global illumination and real-time raytracing ("The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes," claims Epic), the detail of the procedurally generated buildings, and how dense it all is in terms of cars and foot traffic.

And the most convincing part is that it's not just a scripted sequence running in real-time on your PS5 or Xbox like practically every other tech demo you've seen — you get to run, drive, and fly through it, manipulate the angle of the sun, turn on filters, and dive into a full photo mode, as soon as the scripted and on-rails shooter parts of the demo are done. Not that there's a lot to do in The Matrix Awakens except finding different ways to take in the view. You can't land on buildings, there's no car chases except for the scripted one, no bullets to dodge. You can crash any one of the game's 38,146 drivable cars into any of the other cars or walls, I guess. I did a bunch of that before I got bored, though, just taking in the world.... Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city....

Epic Games' pitch is that Unreal Engine 5 developers can do this or better with its ready-made tools at their disposal, and I can't wait to see them try.

"To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year..." according to an article from NASA:

"The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years," said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX. "It was based on some very smart mathematics: In under an hour, you could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years — an incredible feat."
But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477), summarizes some new changes: For nearly 20 years, newly discovered asteroids had orbital predictions processed by a system called "Sentry", resulting in quick estimates on the impact risk they represent with Earth. Generally this has worked well, but several things in the future required updates, and a new system adds a number of useful features too.

The coming wave of big survey telescopes which will check the whole sky every few days is going to greatly increase the number of discoveries. That requires streamlining of the overall system to improve processing speed. The new system can also automatically incorporate factors which previously required manual intervention to calculate, particularly the effect of asteroid rotation creating non-gravitational forces on a new discovery's future orbit. Objects like asteroid Bennu (recently subject of a sampling mission) had significant uncertainty on their future path because of these effects. That doesn't mean that Bennu can possibly hit us in the next few centuries, but it became harder to say over the next few millennia. As NASA puts it:

Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment's notice. This is not the reality. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun.

But sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth's future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids' positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk....

[T]he researchers have made the impact monitoring system more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million.


The article includes videos explaining the future uncertainties on the orbits of potentially hazardous asteroids Bennu and Apophis.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson shares which actions be believes need to be taken to address the climate crisis. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley: To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future -- then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is one of the most brilliant writers of the genre. During Covid quarantine, I read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade. The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story. [...] What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries. The screen doesn't fade to black; instead we watch people keep dying, and coping, and struggling to shape a future -- often gloriously.

I spoke to Robinson recently for an episode of the podcast The Dig. He told me that he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a "time stamp on [their] political view" that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form "a united front," he told me. "It's an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions." The point of Robinson's decades of sci-fi isn't to simply counsel "vote blue no matter who." He told me he remains a proud and longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But he does want leftists -- and everyone else -- to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

Robinson's "all-hands" call is even more challenging on technology and economics than on electoral campaigns. He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun. As Ministry dramatizes, and as he reminded me, there's a good chance that a country being devastated by climate breakdown will try this, whether it's authorized by the international community or not. More broadly, Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention -- from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean -- from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: Scientists have spotted an unusually large exoplanet in orbit around b Centauri, a massive two-star system that is visible to the unaided eye. With a combined weight of roughly 10 Suns, it's now the heaviest star system known to host a planet. The details of this discovery were published today in Nature. The newly discovered planet, called "b Cen (AB)b," is likely a gas giant and is heavier than 10 Jupiters combined, making it one of the most massive planets ever discovered. It orbits the b Centauri binary system, which is located 325 light-years from Earth and has a combined mass of nearly 10 Suns. At 52 billion miles from its host stars, this planet has one of the widest orbits ever detected. By comparison, Pluto orbits the Sun at around 3.3 billion miles, so yeah, that's an unbelievable separation. Until now, planets had not been found in orbit around star systems weighing more than three solar masses. Astronomers didn't think planets could form around systems like this, so it's forcing a major rethink of what's possible in terms of planetary architectures and the conditions under which planets can form.

That a planet exists in this star system is indeed surprising. Young stars have protoplanetary disks around them, from which planets eventually emerge. A hot star system like b Centauri, however, is not supposed to be conducive to planetary formation, owing to tremendous amounts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. This high-energy radiation "tends to destroy the disks in a very short time," and it was "thought that this wouldn't give planets enough time to form in the disk before it disappeared," [said Markus Janson, an astronomer at Stockholm University and the first author of the study]. Yet there it is -- a full fledged planet around the b Centauri system. [...] A neat observation is how the ratio between the masses of the star system and its planet closely matches that of our Sun and Jupiter. But that's where the comparison ends, as the scale of b Centauri is far vaster, as the planet is 10 times the mass of Jupiter and with an orbit that's 100 times wider. [...]

From an astrobiological perspective, Janson added that b Centauri is "possibly one of the worst places in the galaxy to host life." Together, the binary pair spew enormous amounts of UV and X-ray radiation, "which would sterilize any surface that is exposed to it," so "life on any surface in the system is certainly not very likely." Still, Janson did not rule out the possibility that life could exist in subterranean oceans, matching ongoing speculation about basic life existing on Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: There's a long-running conspiracy theory among a small number of cryptocurrency enthusiasts that Bitcoin's anonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, was actually the CIA or another three-lettered agency. That fringe theory is having a fresh day in the sun after CIA Director William Burns said on Monday that the intelligence agency has "a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency" on the go. Burns made his comments at the tail end of a talk at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Summit. After discussing everything from the possible Russian invasion of Ukraine to the challenges of space, someone in the audience asked if the agency is on top of cryptocurrencies, which are currently at the center of the ransomware epidemic that U.S. officials are attempting to get a handle on and stamp out.

Here's what Burns said: "'This is something I inherited. My predecessor had started this, but had set in motion a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency and trying to look at second- and third-order consequences as well and helping with our colleagues in other parts of the U.S. government to provide solid intelligence on what we're seeing as well.'" Cryptocurrencies "could have enormous impact on everything from ransomware attacks, as you mentioned, because one of the ways of getting at ransomware attacks and deterring them is to be able to get at the financial networks that so many of those criminal networks use and that gets right at the issue of digital currencies as well," Burns said.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: The comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) -- the largest our telescopes have ever spotted -- is on a journey from the outer reaches of our Solar System that will see it flying relatively close to Saturn's orbit. Now, a new analysis of the data we've collected on BB has revealed something rather surprising. Digging into readings logged by the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) between 2018 and 2020, researchers have discovered that BB became active much earlier, and much farther out from the Sun, than was previously thought.

A comet becomes active when light from the Sun heats its icy surface, turning ice to vapor and releasing trapped dust and grit. The resulting haze, called a coma, can be useful for astronomers in working out exactly what a particular comet is made out of. In the case of BB, it's still too far out for water to sublimate. Based on studies of comets at similar distances, it's likely that the emerging fog is driven instead by a slow release of carbon monoxide. Only one active comet has previously been directly observed at a greater distance from the Sun, and it was much smaller than BB. "These observations are pushing the distances for active comets dramatically farther than we have previously known," says astronomer Tony Farnham, from the University of Maryland (UMD). "We make the assumption that comet BB was probably active even farther out, but we just didn't see it before this. What we don't know yet is if there's some cut-off point where we can start to see these things in cold storage before they become active."

The research has been published in the Planetary Science Journal.

If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will launch early Wednesday morning "to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory," reports The New York Times. "Results from the test, if successful, will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact." From the report: The DART spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time (or 10:20 p.m. local time) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA plans to host a livestream of the launch on its YouTube channel starting at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site prompts a delay, the next opportunity for liftoff would be about 24 hours later.

After launching to space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun before it crosses paths with Dimorphos, a football-field-size asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target practice. DART's impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally called a kinetic impactor, will autonomously steer itself straight toward Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture and send back photos to Earth in real time until 20 seconds before impact. A tiny satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles from the asteroid to snap images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART's impact.