In late 2019, Microsoft announced Windows 10X, a new flavor of Windows 10 designed for dual-screen PCs. Windows 10X, Microsoft said at the time, will power dual-screen PCs from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and of course Microsoft. But it appears Microsoft has changed its plans about what it wants to do with this version of Windows 10. Microsoft-focused news outlet Petri reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Microsoft will not be shipping Windows 10X this year and the OS, as was described by the company in 2019, will likely never arrive. From the report: The company has shifted resources to Windows 10 and 10X is on the back burner, for now. For about a decade, Microsoft has been trying to modernize Windows in various ways. We have seen Windows RT, Windows 10S, and now Windows 10X. The question becomes if there really is a future for anything other than traditional Windows 10? Microsoft said during their last earnings call that there were 1.3 billion active devices are running the OS each month and with that context in mind, does there really need to be a 'lite' version of the OS?

It's a fair question at this point because Microsoft's history of trying to overhaul Windows is a journey down a road with many headstones along the way to 2021. The reality is that if Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a modern version of Windows 10, it should be to run Windows 10 on ARM. A watered-down version of the OS to compete against Chromebooks is not working out today, much like it has not worked out in the past and it may never work out either but the future is hard to predict. While Windows 10 was put in the backseat for the past couple of years and many looked at 10X as a possible revival of excitement for the OS, all eyes should now be focused on Sun Valley -- the next major update to Windows 10. If something is going to return the limelight to Windows, it has to be Sun Valley because that's the only thing left. But just because 10X isn't coming to market anytime soon, the technologies that were built for 10X are migrating to Windows 10. Not everything from 10X will show up in 10 but I would expect to see things like UI updates, app containers, and more arrive in Windows 10.

Microsoft is now planning to refresh the Windows 95-era icons you still sometimes come across in Windows 10. The Verge reports: Windows Latest has spotted new icons for the hibernation mode, networking, memory, floppy drives, and much more as part of the shell32.dll file in preview versions of Windows 10. This DLL is a key part of the Windows Shell, which surfaces icons in a variety of dialog boxes throughout the operating system. It's also a big reason why Windows icons have been so inconsistent throughout the years. Microsoft has often modernized other parts of the OS only for an older app to throw you into a dialog box with Windows 95-era icons from shell32.dll. Hopefully this also means Windows will never ask you for a floppy disk drive when you dig into Device Manager to update a driver. That era of Windows, along with these old icons, has been well and truly over for more than a decade now. These new changes are part of Microsoft's design overhaul to Windows 10, codenamed Sun Valley. "We're expecting to hear more about Sun Valley at Microsoft's Build conference later this month, or as part of a dedicated Windows news event," notes The Verge.

"After more than 25 years of Canadian governments pursuing a hands-off approach to the online world, the government of Justin Trudeau is now pushing Bill C-10, a law that would see Canadians subjected to the most regulated internet in the free world," argues the Vancouver Sun (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck): Although pitched as a way to expand Canadian content provisions to the online sphere, the powers of Bill C-10 have expanded considerably in committee, including a provision introduced last week that could conceivably allow the federal government to order the deletion of any Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter upload made by a Canadian. In comments this week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh indicated his party was open to providing the votes needed to pass C-10, seeing the bill as a means to combat online hate...

The users themselves may not necessarily be subject to direct CRTC regulation, but social media providers would have to answer to every post on their platforms as if it were a TV show or radio program. This might be a good time to mention that members of the current Liberal cabinet have openly flirted with empowering the federal government to control social media. In a September Tweet, Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said that if social media companies "can't regulate yourselves, governments will." Guilbeault, the prime champion of Bill C-10, has spoken openly of a federal regulator that could order takedowns of any social media post that it deems to be hateful or propagandistic...

Basically, if your Canadian website isn't a text-only GeoCities blog from 1996, Bill C-10 thinks it's a program deserving of CRTC regulation. This covers news sites, podcasts, blogs, the websites of political parties or activist groups and even foreign websites that might be seen in Canada...

The penalties prescribed by Bill C-10 are substantial. For corporations, a first offence can yield penalties of up to $10 million, while subsequent offences could be up to $15 million apiece. If TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are suddenly put in a situation where their millions of users must follow the same rules as a Canadian cable channel or radio station, it's not unreasonable to assume they may just follow Facebook's example [in Australia] and take the nuclear option.

"Scientists have spotted one of the largest stellar flares ever recorded in our galaxy," reports Space.com: The jets of plasma shot outward from the sun's nearest neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. The flare, which was around 100 times more powerful than any experienced in our solar system, could change the way scientists think about solar radiation and alien life...

On May 1, 2019, the team captured the mega flare, which shone for just 7 seconds and was mainly visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. "The star went from normal to 14,000 times brighter when seen in ultraviolet wavelengths over the span of a few seconds," lead author Meredith MacGregor, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement...

The flare on Proxima Centauri was extremely powerful compared with those emitted by the sun. Unlike flares from the sun, this one also emitted different kinds of radiation. In particular, it produced a huge surge of ultraviolet light and radio waves — known as "millimeter radiation...." The new findings suggest that stellar flares given off by red dwarfs are much more violent than previously expected and could reduce the likelihood of alien life developing around them.
Proxima Centauri is orbited by two explanets, one of which "is considered to be Earth-like and lies within the star's habitable zone — the distance from a star that could support the development of life, according to the researchers..."

But in a statement, the leader authors now points out that Proxima Centauri's planets "are getting hit by something like this not once in a century, but at least once a day, if not several times a day."

Astronomers reconstructed a space rock's path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. From a report: On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement. Five feet long and weighing about the same as an adult African elephant, this space rock posed no threat. But the early detection of this asteroid, only the second to be spotted in space before hitting land, was a good test of our ability to spot larger, more dangerous asteroids. Moreover, it afforded scientists the chance to study the asteroid before its obliteration, quickly narrow down the impact site and obtain some of the most pristine, least weathered meteorite samples around. Later that day, a fireball almost as bright as the sun illuminated Botswana's darkened sky before exploding 17 miles above ground with the force of 200 tons of TNT. Fragments fell like extraterrestrial buckshot into a national park larger than the Netherlands.

Immediately, Botswanan scientists and guides joined with international meteorite experts to hunt for the asteroid's wreckage. As of November 2020, the team has found 24 individual meteorites. And thanks to the telltale geology of these rocky leftovers, observations of their path to Earth and the memories of a dead NASA spacecraft, scientists were able to unspool the history of this asteroid with breathtaking detail. As reported earlier this month in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Botswana's off-world visitor was once part of Vesta, a gigantic ramshackle asteroid forged at the dawn of the solar system. About 22 million years ago, another asteroid crashed into one of its lonely hills, leaving a modest crater and sending countless shards of Vesta on a space odyssey. One of them was the object that fell over southern Africa in 2018, an explosive end to a lonely journey. 'It is such an amazing thing to be in possession of such a rare specimen with so much history attached to it," said Mohutsiwa Gabadirwe, a geologist and curator at the Botswana Geoscience Institute who is a co-author.

Named 2018 LA, the asteroid was first seen by the Catalina Sky Survey, a trio of telescopes north of Tucson, Ariz. Additional telescopes, like the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, saw it too, allowing scientists to tentatively map out an impact site in southern Africa. Peter Jenniskens, a meteorite expert at the SETI Institute and study author, said that the initial search area was a 1,400-square-mile patch in Botswana. Hoping to shrink it down, he visited local businesses with Oliver Moses of the Okavango Research Institute. They located security camera footage at a hotel and gas stations that had recorded the fireball, allowing them to more precisely pinpoint the fall site: a (still-sizable) spot within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This was a surreal place to go meteorite hunting. Bat-eared foxes and warthogs strolled past, lions stealthily stalked and slaughtered giraffes while leopards lounged in trees. Wardens from Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks protected the search party in case a fanged predator got too close for comfort. The meteorites also looked a lot like animal poop, meaning the team were frequently bamboozled by coprological impostors. 'It was a totally unusual experience for all of us,' said Mr. Gabadirwe.

The chief executives of Facebook and Apple have opposing visions for the future of the internet. Their differences are set to escalate later today. The New York Times: At a confab for tech and media moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July 2019, Timothy D. Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook sat down to repair their fraying relationship. For years, the chief executives had met annually at the conference, which was held by the investment bank Allen & Company, to catch up. But this time, Facebook was grappling with a data privacy scandal. Mr. Zuckerberg had been blasted by lawmakers, regulators and executives -- including Mr. Cook -- for letting the information of more than 50 million Facebook users be harvested by a voter-profiling firm, Cambridge Analytica, without their consent. At the meeting, Mr. Zuckerberg asked Mr. Cook how he would handle the fallout from the controversy, people with knowledge of the conversation said. Mr. Cook responded acidly that Facebook should delete any information that it had collected about people outside of its core apps.

Mr. Zuckerberg was stunned, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Facebook depends on data about its users to target them with online ads and to make money. By urging Facebook to stop gathering that information, Mr. Cook was in effect telling Mr. Zuckerberg that his business was untenable. He ignored Mr. Cook's advice. Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Cook's opposing positions have exploded into an all-out war. On Monday, Apple plans to release a new privacy feature that requires iPhone owners to explicitly choose whether to let apps like Facebook track them across other apps. One of the secrets of digital advertising is that companies like Facebook follow people's online habits as they click on other programs, like Spotify and Amazon, on smartphones. That data helps advertisers pinpoint users' interests and better target finely tuned ads. Now, many people are expected to say no to that tracking, delivering a blow to online advertising -- and Facebook's $70 billion business.

At the center of the fight are the two C.E.O.s. Their differences have long been evident. Mr. Cook, 60, is a polished executive who rose through Apple's ranks by constructing efficient supply chains. Mr. Zuckerberg, 36, is a Harvard dropout who built a social-media empire with an anything-goes stance toward free speech. Those contrasts have widened with their deeply divergent visions for the digital future. Mr. Cook wants people to pay a premium -- often to Apple -- for a safer, more private version of the internet. It is a strategy that keeps Apple firmly in control. But Mr. Zuckerberg champions an "open' internet where services like Facebook are effectively free. In that scenario, advertisers foot the bill. The relationship between the chief executives has become increasingly chilly, people familiar with the men said. While Mr. Zuckerberg once took walks and dined with Steve Jobs, Apple's late co-founder, he does not do so with Mr. Cook. Mr. Cook regularly met with Larry Page, Google's co-founder, but he and Mr. Zuckerberg see each other infrequently at events like the Allen & Company conference, these people said.

In 2018 Oracle's Larry Ellison bought the historic Cal Neva Lodge on the scenic north shore of California's Lake Tahoe for $36 million. Then in 2019 Mark Zuckerberg bought a $59 million compound on Lake Tahoe's west shore.

But now a wave of techies are moving in, reports Outside magazine, "freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: 'Zoom-towns.'" "It's the wildest time," says realtor Katey Brandenburg, who works on Tahoe's Nevada side. For her and other realtors around the lake, the autumn of 2020 felt like winning the lottery. "I paid off a lifetime of debt — 28 years of loans, college, credit cards, and cars — in three months."

All told, 2020 saw more than 2,350 homes sold across the Tahoe Basin, for a boggling $3.28 billion, up from $1.76 billion in 2019, according to data analyzed by Sierra Sotheby's. That $3 billion stat is on a par with 2020 home-sales revenues in Aspen, Colorado (albeit there, the latest average home-sale price came in at $11 million). The trend is in line with real estate records being shattered from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Stowe, Vermont. And according to a just-released market update, it hasn't stopped: in the first quarter of 2021, median prices for single-family homes increased by an astronomical 70 percent year over year in Truckee, 72 percent in South Lake, and 81 percent in Incline Village...

"A disproportionate number of people who purchased homes in Tahoe in 2020 are employees of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area," says Deniz Kahramaner, founder of Atlasa, a real estate brokerage firm that specializes in data analytics. Of the 2,280 new-home buyers Atlasa identified throughout the Tahoe region in 2020, roughly 30 percent worked at software companies. The top three employers were Google (54 buyers), Apple (46), and Facebook (34)...

There is, however, one glaring issue with all this rapid, high-priced growth: the people who actually make a mountain town run — the ski instructors and patrollers, lift operators and shuttle drivers, housekeepers and snowcat mechanics, cooks and servers — can no longer afford to live there.
The article does note higher property taxes going toward public services (along with "more money eventually pumping into bars and restaurants.") And it also acknowledges affordable housing has for decades been an issue in tourist towns.

"It's just suddenly on steroids..."

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: The whitest-ever paint has been produced by academic researchers, with the aim of boosting the cooling of buildings and tackling the climate crisis. The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years. Currently available reflective white paints are far better than dark roofing materials, but only reflect 80-90% of sunlight and absorb UV light. This means they cannot cool surfaces below ambient temperatures. The new paint does this, leading to less need for air conditioning and the carbon emissions they produce, which are rising rapidly.

The new paint was revealed in a report in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Three factors are responsible for the paint's cooling performance. First, barium sulphate was used as the pigment which, unlike conventional titanium dioxide pigment, does not absorb UV light. Second, a high concentration of pigment was used -- 60%. Third, the pigment particles were of varied size. The amount of light scattered by a particle depends on its size, so using a range scatters more of the light spectrum from the sun. The researchers said the ultra-white paint uses a standard acrylic solvent and could be manufactured like conventional paint. They claim the paint would be similar in price to current paints, with barium sulphate actually cheaper than titanium dioxide. They have also tested the paint's resistance to abrasion, but said longer-term weathering tests were needed to assess its long-term durability.

"Astrophysicists have found a new region of the Milky Way, and it's filled with searingly hot, bright-blue stars that are about to explode," writes Live Science (in a report shared by long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot): The researchers were creating the most detailed map yet of the star-flecked spiral arms of our galactic neighborhood with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia telescope when they discovered the region, which they have named the Cepheus spur, they reported in a new study.

Nestled between the Orion Arm — where our solar system is — and the constellation Perseus, the spur is a belt between two spiral arms filled with enormous stars three times the size of the sun and colored blue by their blistering heat. Astronomers call these giant, blue stars OB stars due to the predominantly blue wavelengths of light that they emit. They are the rarest, hottest, shortest-living and largest stars in the entire galaxy. The violent nuclear reactions taking place inside their hearts make them six times hotter than the sun. And the enormous stellar explosions that end their lives — called supernovas — scatter the heavy elements essential for complex life far into the galaxy.

"OB stars are rare, in a Galaxy of 400 billion stars there might be less than 200,000," study co-author Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, a researcher at the Spanish Astrobiology Center (CAB), told Live Science.

TAE Technologies, a 20-year-old fusion energy technology developer, is claiming to have hit a milestone in the development of a new technology for generation power from nuclear fusion. The company said its reactors could be operating at commercial scale by the end of the decade, thanks to its newfound ability to produce stable plasma at temperatures over 50 million degrees (nearly twice as hot as the sun). TechCrunch reports: For TAE Technologies, the achievement serves as a validation of the life's work of Norman Rostoker, one of the company's co-founders who had devoted his life to fusion energy research and died before he could see the company he helped create reach its latest milestone. "This is an incredibly rewarding milestone and an apt tribute to the vision of my late mentor, Norman Rostoker," said TAE's current chief executive officer, Michl Binderbauer, in a statement announcing the company's achievement. "Norman and I wrote a paper in the 1990s theorizing that a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase. We have now been able to demonstrate this plasma behavior with overwhelming evidence. It is a powerful validation of our work over the last three decades, and a very critical milestone for TAE that proves the laws of physics are on our side."

Rostoker's legacy lives on inside TAE through the company's technology platform, called, appropriately, "Norman." In the last 18 months that technology has demonstrated consistent performance, reaching over 50 million degrees in several hundred test cycles. Six years ago, the company had proved that its reactor design could sustain plasma indefinitely -- meaning that once the switch is flipped on a reaction, that fusion reaction can continue indefinitely. Now, the company said, it has achieved the necessary temperatures to make its reactors commercially viable. It's with these milestones behind it that TAE was able to raise an additional $280 million in financing, bringing its total up to $880 million and making it one of the best financed private nuclear fusion endeavors in the world.

On the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, Engadget reports: Were he still alive today, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would be 52 years old. Every February 20th, on the day of his birthday, fans wonder what songs he would write if he hadn't died of suicide nearly 30 years ago. While we'll never know the answer to that question, an AI is attempting to fill the gap.

A mental health organization called Over the Bridge used Google's Magenta AI and a generic neural network to examine more than two dozen songs by Nirvana to create a 'new' track from the band. "Drowned in the Sun" opens with reverb-soaked plucking before turning into an assault of distorted power chords. "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," Nirvana tribute band frontman Eric Hogan sings in the chorus. In execution, it sounds not all that dissimilar from "You Know You're Right," one of the last songs Nirvana recorded before Cobain's death in 1994.

Other than the voice of Hogan, everything you hear in the song was generated by the two AI programs Over the Bridge used. The organization first fed Magenta songs as MIDI files so that the software could learn the specific notes and harmonies that made the band's tunes so iconic. Humorously, Cobain's loose and aggressive guitar playing style gave Magenta some trouble, with the AI mostly outputting a wall of distortion instead of something akin to his signature melodies. "It was a lot of trial and error," Over the Bridge board member Sean O'Connor told Rolling Stone. Once they had some musical and lyrical samples, the creative team picked the best bits to record. Most of the instrumentation you hear are MIDI tracks with different effects layered on top.
Some thoughts from The Daily Dot: Rolling Stone also highlighted lyrics like, "The sun shines on you but I don't know how," and what is called "a surprisingly anthemic chorus" including the lines, "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," remarking that they "bear evocative, Cobain-esque qualities...."

Neil Turkewitz went full Comic Book Guy, opining, "A perfect illustration of the injustice of developing AI through the ingestion of cultural works without the authorization of [its] creator, and how it forces creators to be indentured servants in the production of a future out of their control," adding, "That it's for a good cause is irrelevant."

"The idea of artificially cooling the planet to blunt climate change — in effect, blocking sunlight before it can warm the atmosphere — got a boost on Thursday when an influential scientific body urged the U.S. government to spend at least $100 million to research the technology," reports the New York Times: That technology, often called solar geoengineering, entails reflecting more of the sun's energy back into space through techniques that include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. In a new report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said that governments urgently need to know whether solar geoengineering could work and what the side effects might be.

"Solar geoengineering is not a substitute for decarbonizing," said Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and head of the committee that produced the report, referring to the need to emit less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Still, he said, technology to reflect sunlight "deserves substantial funding, and it should be researched as rapidly and effectively as possible." The report acknowledged the risks that have made geoengineering one of the most contentious issues in climate policy. Those risks include upsetting regional weather patterns in potentially devastating ways, for example by changing the behavior of the monsoon in South Asia; relaxing public pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and even creating an "unacceptable risk of catastrophically rapid warming" if governments started reflecting sunlight for a period of time, and then later stopped.

But the authors argue that greenhouse gas emissions are not falling quickly enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, which means the world must begin to examine other options. Evidence for or against solar geoengineering, they found, "could have profound value" in guiding decisions about whether to deploy it.

The US should establish a multimillion-dollar research program on solar geoengineering, according to the country's national science academy. The Guardian reports: In a report it recommends funding of $100 million to $200 million over five years to better understand the feasibility of interventions to dim the sun, the risk of harmful unintended consequences and how such technology could be governed in an ethical way. The National Academies of Sciences (NAS) said cutting fossil fuel emissions remained the most urgent and important action to tackle the climate crisis. But it said the worryingly slow progress on climate action meant all options needed to be understood.

The report considers three types of solar geoengineering to allow more heat to escape the Earth's atmosphere: injecting tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere to block sunlight; using the particles to make low-lying clouds over the oceans more reflective; and thinning high-altitude cirrus clouds. Major volcanic eruptions are already known to cool the climate by pumping particles high into the atmosphere. [...]

Proponents of geoengineering argue that impacts of global heating could be so great that every option to limit these must be explored. Opponents argue that such research increases the risk that such technologies could be deployed, perhaps by rogue states, instead of cutting emissions. Critics also warn that solar geoengineering could cause damage such as crop failures, and would need to be maintained to avoid a sudden hike in temperature, unless carbon emissions fall rapidly.

Aaron Blake, writing at The Washington Post: Americans turned their clocks forward an hour earlier this week for what some hope will be the last time, as bipartisan momentum builds for making daylight saving time permanent. As The Post's Capital Weather Gang notes, a bill spearheaded by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has united lawmakers from opposite parties who can't agree on much of anything these days. It also builds upon legislation already passed in 16 states -- both red and blue -- and current debates in states such as Nevada. All of it reflects apparently real momentum behind the effort. But as most of us bemoan our messed-up sleep schedules on the first Monday after losing an hour, it's worth a little history lesson: We've tried this before, and it didn't go over well. Whatever momentary mental anguish you're experiencing right now, there are huge trade-offs that many or most Americans have previously decided aren't worth the switch.

The year was 1973, and the United States was experiencing an energy crisis. Among the proposals put forward by President Richard M. Nixon in a November address was making daylight saving time permanent for the next two winters. Despite scant evidence of daylight saving time's past benefit on the energy supply (dating back to DST's various introductions since World War I), Americans really liked the idea. Polling in November and December 1973 showed strong and in some cases overwhelming support -- 57 percent in a Gallup poll, 74 percent in a Louis Harris and Associates poll, and 73 percent in a poll from the Roper Organization. The policy was quickly implemented in early January 1974. But it just as quickly fell out of favor. In a Roper poll conducted in February and March, just 30 percent remained in favor of year-round daylight saving time, while a majority favored switching times again. Louis Harris polling in March showed just 19 percent of people said it had been a good idea, while about twice as many -- 43 percent -- said it was a bad one.

A big reason for the about-face? Whatever benefits might have been gleaned by giving people more sunlight in the evening during the winter, it also meant longer, darker mornings. Parents were suddenly sending their kids to school in the cold and the dark for months on end. As the Capital Weather Gang noted, such a change means the sun wouldn't rise before 8 a.m. in Washington for more than two and a half months, between late November and mid-February. The morning darkness would linger even longer farther north. Polling later that year -- after the dark mornings had waned -- was more mixed, with an Opinion Research poll in September showing 31 percent of people strongly favored the idea and 42 percent strongly opposed it. But even that wasn't good. And the idea was abandoned shortly before the next round of morning darkness would descend in the winter of 1974-1975. A Department of Transportation study at the time concluded that the change actually had minimal impact on saving energy and might have actually increased gasoline consumption.

rushtobugment shares a report from ScienceAlert: Using the positions and shifting light of stars, both near and far, astronomer Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones has demonstrated the feasibility of autonomous, on-the-fly navigation for spacecraft traveling far beyond the Solar System. "When traveling to the nearest stars, signals will be far too weak and light travel times will be of order years," Bailer-Jones wrote in his paper, which is currently available on the preprint server arXiv, where it awaits peer review from the astronomy community. "An interstellar spacecraft will therefore have to navigate autonomously, and use this information to decide when to make course corrections or to switch on instruments. Such a spacecraft needs to be able to determine its position and velocity using only onboard measurements."

With a catalog of stars, Bailer-Jones was able to show that it's possible to work out a spacecraft's coordinates in six dimensions -- three in space and three in velocity -- to a high accuracy, based on the way the positions of those stars changes from the spacecraft's point of view. "As a spacecraft moves away from the Sun, the observed positions and velocities of the stars will change relative to those in a Earth-based catalog due to parallax, aberration, and the Doppler effect," he wrote. "By measuring just the angular distances between pairs of stars, and comparing these to the catalog, we can infer the coordinates of the spacecraft via an iterative forward-modeling process."

Bailer-Jones tested his system using a simulated star catalog, and then on nearby stars from the Hipparcos catalog compiled in 1997, at relativistic spacecraft speeds. Although this is not as accurate as Gaia, that's not terribly important - the aim was to test that the navigation system can work. With just 20 stars, the system can determine the position and velocity of a spacecraft to within 3 astronomical units and 2 kilometers per second (1.24 miles per second). This accuracy can be improved inverse to the square root of the number of stars; with 100 stars, the accuracy came down to 1.3 astronomical units and 0.7 kilometers per second. [...] The system hasn't taken stellar binaries into consideration, nor has it considered the instrumentation. The aim was to show that it could be done, as a first step towards actualizing it. It's even possible that it could be used in tandem with pulsar navigation so that the two systems might be able to minimize each other's flaws.

It's been almost half a century since the three astronauts on board the Skylab 4 space mission famously fell out with mission control. Soon afterwards, reports began to circulate that they went on strike. But Ed Gibson, the only one of the crew still alive, says the idea that they stopped work is a myth. From a report: Bill Pogue got sick soon after the three astronauts arrived at the space station. It came as a surprise because Bill had been nicknamed "Iron Belly" during training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He could endlessly tolerate sitting in a rapidly rotating chair while moving his head backwards and forwards and side to side, without being sick. But this was the first time the three men had been in space and evidently resistance to motion sickness back on Earth didn't mean much up there.

Commander Jerry Carr suggested Bill eat a can of tomatoes to settle his stomach. Ed Gibson was sitting between the two men, and remembers the can floating past from left to right before his eyes. "Then I remember some bad noises coming from Bill, and a barf bag floating back from right to left," he says. "We felt discouraged because we knew we had so much work to do -- that's when we made our first mistake." Ed is 84 now and the Skylab 4 mission began in November 1973 but time hasn't dulled his most vivid memories -- the Earth from space, the blazing corona of the sun and the silence of a spacewalk. He's the last one of the astronauts able to share the story, because Jerry Carr and Bill Pogue have both died -- Carr last summer and Pogue in 2014. The Skylab space station was a research platform in orbit where astronauts helped scientists to study the human body's response to space flight, carried out experiments and made observations of the Sun and Earth. Skylab 4 was the final mission and as a result it had a long list of tasks to fulfil. The 84-day mission -- the longest ever at that point -- was on a tight schedule. Nasa was very concerned about someone getting sick, which would have meant losing precious time.

Nasa accepts that mission planners had not given the crew the typical period of adjustment to acclimatise to working weightlessly in orbit and had packed their schedules with large amounts of work. The number of spacewalks was also doubled, to four, to observe a newly discovered comet, Kohoutek. So the astronauts were already under pressure when they made their first bad decision. "We wanted to get organised before starting a big flurry with the ground so we decided to delay telling them about Bill being sick," says Ed. But they had forgotten that everything they said on board was being recorded, and that mission control was listening in. It wasn't long before the voice of Astronaut Office chief Alan Shepard came crackling over the radio from down in mission control, an exchange also broadcast to the public. "He got on the line and read us the riot act for not telling them immediately," says Ed. "Al was OK, we just didn't like being chewed out in front of the whole world."

lazarus shares a report from Phys.org: Two Arizona State University astrophysicists, Steven Desch and Alan Jackson of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, set out to explain the odd features of 'Oumuamua and have determined that it is likely a piece of a Pluto-like planet from another solar system. Desch and Jackson hypothesized that the object was made of different ices and calculated how quickly these ices would sublimate (passing from a solid to a gas) as 'Oumuamua passed by the sun. From there, they calculated the rocket effect, the object's mass and shape, and the reflectivity of the ices.

The scientists found one ice in particular -- solid nitrogen -- that provided an exact match to all the object's features simultaneously. And since solid nitrogen ice can be seen on the surface of Pluto, it is possible that a comet-like object could be made of the same material. "We knew we had hit on the right idea when we completed the calculation for what albedo (how reflective the body is) would make the motion of 'Oumuamua match the observations," said Jackson, who is a research scientist and an Exploration Fellow at ASU. "That value came out as being the same as we observe on the surface of Pluto or Triton, bodies covered in nitrogen ice."

They then calculated the rate at which chunks of solid nitrogen ice would have been knocked off the surfaces of Pluto and similar bodies early in our solar system's history. And they calculated the probability that chunks of solid nitrogen ice from other solar systems would reach ours. "It was likely knocked off the surface by an impact about half a billion years ago and thrown out of its parent system," Jackson said. "Being made of frozen nitrogen also explains the unusual shape of 'Oumuamua. As the outer layers of nitrogen ice evaporated, the shape of the body would have become progressively more flattened, just like a bar of soap does as the outer layers get rubbed off through use."

Astronomers have found the farthest known source of radio emissions in the universe: a quasar 13 billion light-years from Earth spewing jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Live Science reports: Quasars are some of the oldest, most distant, most massive and brightest objects in the universe. They make up the cores of galaxies where a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole gorges on all the matter that's unable to escape its gravitational grasp. While the black hole is devouring this matter, it's also blasting out an enormous amount of radiation that collectively can be more than a trillion times more luminous than the brightest stars, making quasars the brightest objects in the observable universe.

This quasar in particular, named P172+18, is a relic from around 780 million years after the Big Bang and reveals clues about one of the earliest ages of the universe -- the epoch of reionization. At the start of this period, the universe was darkly veiled by a mostly uniform cloud of hydrogen gas. Scientists refer to this time as the universe's dark ages, because most light emitted was quickly absorbed by the neutrally charged gas. Eventually, gravity collapsed the primordial gas into the first stars and quasars, which began to heat and ionize the surrounding gases, allowing light to pass through. [...] Further observations from telescopes [...] showed that P172+18 is nearly 300 million times more massive than the sun and is among the fastest-growing quasars ever discovered. The problem is, scientists don't know how a black hole became so massive this early on in the universe. The radio jets could be an explanation. The researchers' findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The kingdom is building a $5 billion plant to make green fuel for export and lessen the country's dependence on petrodollars. From a report: Sun-scorched expanses and steady Red Sea breezes make the northwest tip of Saudi Arabia prime real estate for what the kingdom hopes will become a global hub for green hydrogen. As governments and industries seek less-polluting alternatives to hydrocarbons, the world's biggest crude exporter doesn't want to cede the burgeoning hydrogen business to China, Europe or Australia and lose a potentially massive source of income. So it's building a $5 billion plant powered entirely by sun and wind that will be among the world's biggest green hydrogen makers when it opens in the planned megacity of Neom in 2025. The task of turning a patch of desert the size of Belgium into a metropolis powered by renewable energy falls to Peter Terium, the former chief executive officer of RWE AG, Germany's biggest utility, and clean-energy spinoff Innogy SE. His performance will help determine whether a country dependent on petrodollars can transition into a supplier of non-polluting fuels.

"There's nothing I've ever seen or heard of this dimension or challenge," Terium said. "I've been spending the last two years wrapping my mind around 'from scratch,' and now we're very much in execution mode." Hydrogen is morphing from a niche power source -- used in zeppelins, rockets and nuclear weapons == into big business, with the European Union alone committing $500 billion to scale up its infrastructure. Huge obstacles remain to the gas becoming a major part of the energy transition, and skeptics point to Saudi Arabia's weak track record so far capitalizing on what should be a competitive edge in the renewables business, especially solar, where there are many plans but few operational projects. But countries are jostling for position in a future global market, and hydrogen experts list the kingdom as one to watch.

The U.K. is hosting 10 projects to heat buildings with the gas, China is deploying fuel-cell buses and commercial vehicles, and Japan is planning to use the gas in steelmaking. U.S. presidential climate envoy John Kerry urged the domestic oil and gas industry to embrace hydrogen's "huge opportunities." That should mean plenty of potential customers for the plant called Helios Green Fuels. Saudi Arabia is setting its sights on becoming the world's largest supplier of hydrogen -- a market that BloombergNEF estimates could be worth as much as $700 billion by 2050. "You're seeing a more diversified portfolio of energy exports that is more resilient," said Shihab Elborai, a Dubai-based partner at consultant Strategy&. "It's diversified against any uncertainties in the rate and timing of the energy transition." Blueprints are being drawn and strategies are being announced, but it's still early days for the industry. Hydrogen is expensive to make without expelling greenhouse gases, difficult to store and highly combustible. Green hydrogen is produced by using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. The current cost of producing a kilogram is a little under $5, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

One billion years from now, Earth's atmosphere will contain very little oxygen, making it uninhabitable for complex aerobic life. From a report: Today, oxygen makes up around 21 per cent of Earth's atmosphere. Its oxygen-rich nature is ideal for large and complex organisms, like humans, that require the gas to survive. But early in Earth's history, oxygen levels were much lower -- and they are likely to be low again in the distant future. Kazumi Ozaki at Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta modelled Earth's climatic, biological and geological systems to predict how atmospheric conditions on Earth will change. The researchers say that Earth's atmosphere will maintain high levels of oxygen for the next billion years before dramatically returning to low levels reminiscent of those that existed prior to what is known as the Great Oxidation Event of about 2.4 billion years ago. "We find that the Earth's oxygenated atmosphere will not be a permanent feature," says Ozaki. One central reason for the shift is that, as our sun ages, it will become hotter and release more energy.

The researchers calculate that this will lead to a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as CO2 absorbs heat and then breaks down. Ozaki and Reinhard estimate that in a billion years, carbon dioxide levels will become so low that photosynthesising organisms -- including plants -- will be unable to survive and produce oxygen. The mass extinction of these photosynthetic organisms will be the primary cause of the huge reduction in oxygen. "The drop in oxygen is very, very extreme -- we're talking around a million times less oxygen than there is today," says Reinhard.