The first space hurricane ever was spotted in August 2014, consisting of "an eddy of plasma, a type of superhot, charged gas found throughout the solar system," reports Business Insider. "And instead of rain, this storm brought showers of electrons." From the report: In August 2014, satellites observed a swirling mass with a quiet center more than 125 miles above the North Pole. The space hurricane was more than 620 miles wide and high in the sky -- it formed in the ionosphere, between 50 and 600 miles up. Lockwood and his coauthors used the satellite data to create a 3D model of the storm. The space hurricane lasted eight hours, swirling counterclockwise. The researchers said it had several spiral arms snaking out from its center, a bit like a spiral galaxy. By plugging the satellite data into a computer model, Lockwood and his collaborators were able to reproduce the storm and figure out what caused it. They found that charged particles emitted by the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, were to blame.

This steady stream of solar particles and coronal plasma is known as solar wind. It moves at about 1 million miles an hour. As solar wind reaches Earth, it encounters the planet's magnetic field. Earth has such a field because of the swirling liquid iron and nickel in its outer core, which gives rise to electric currents. The magnetosphere protects the planet from deadly radiation from the sun but also retains a tiny layer of plasma from that solar wind. Typically, solar winds glance off this protective sheath. But sometimes the incoming charged particles and plasma interact with either the trapped plasma or the electrical currents generating the field. Such interactions create disturbances in the magnetosphere. The 2014 space hurricane was one such disturbance.

Usually, magnetic fields don't mix. But if they do come close, portions of the fields can get realigned and even merge, forming a new pattern of magnetic energy. That's what likely happened on the day of the space storm: An influx of solar wind energy formed a new pattern above Earth's magnetic north pole. The storm acted as a channel from space into Earth's atmosphere, funneling some electrons down past the planet's armor. This particle rain could have wreaked havoc on our high-frequency radio communications, radar-detection systems, or satellite technology, the study's authors said. That's because charged solar particles that seep through Earth's magnetic field can cause malfunctions in computers and circuitry on satellites and the International Space Station. Luckily, in this case, no issues were observed.

Phys.org shares an announcement from the University of Texas at Austin: Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater.

Death by asteroid rather than by a series of volcanic eruptions or some other global calamity has been the leading hypothesis since the 1980s, when scientists found asteroid dust in the geologic layer that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs. This discovery painted an apocalyptic picture of dust from the vaporized asteroid and rocks from impact circling the planet, blocking out the sun and bringing about mass death through a dark, sustained global winter — all before drifting back to Earth to form the layer enriched in asteroid material that's visible today. In the 1990s, the connection was strengthened with the discovery of a 125-mile-wide Chicxulub impact crater beneath the Gulf of Mexico that is the same age as the rock layer.

The new study seals the deal, researchers said, by finding asteroid dust with a matching chemical fingerprint within that crater at the precise geological location that marks the time of the extinction... The telltale sign of asteroid dust is the element iridium — which is rare in the Earth's crust, but present at elevated levels in certain types of asteroids... In the crater, the sediment layer deposited in the days to years after the strike is so thick that scientists were able to precisely date the dust to a mere two decades after impact.

"We are now at the level of coincidence that geologically doesn't happen without causation," said co-author Sean Gulick, a research professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who co-led the 2016 expedition with Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London...

The dust is all that remains of the 7-mile-wide asteroid that slammed into the planet millions of years ago, triggering the extinction of 75% of life on Earth, including all nonavian dinosaurs.

"Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn's strange moon," says the New York Times, introducing a piece by cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overbye: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn's large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun? Those are the visions that danced through my head recently...diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That is as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan...

NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine. "The Titan submarine is still going," said Dr. Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in an email — although it is unlikely to happen before Titan's next summer, around 2047. By then, he said, there will be more ambient light and the submarine conceivably could communicate on a direct line to Earth with no need of an orbiting radio relay.

Titan is the weirdest place in the solar system, in some regards, and also the world most like our own. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen (the only moon that has much of an atmosphere at all), and like Earth, it has weather, rain, rivers and seas. But on this world, when it rains, it rains gasoline. Hydrocarbon material drifts down like snow and is shaped into dunes by nitrogen winds. Rivers have carved canyons through mountains of frozen soot, and layers of ice float on subsurface oceans of ammonia. The prevailing surface temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical sludge that optimistic astronomers call "prebiotic" creeps along under an oppressive brown sky. Besides Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe that is known to harbor liquid on its surface — with everything that could imply.

"The huge parachute used by NASA's Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message," reports the Associated Press — thanks to the rover's puzzle-loving systems engineer Ian Clark.

"During a live stream discussing the landing, one Nasa commentator said: 'Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work,'" reports the Guardian.

One Reddit user actually deciphered the message using Python code.

Long-time Slashdot reader rufey writes that "Decoded the slogan is 'Dare Mighty Things' — a line from President Theodore Roosevelt — which is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center's walls." The orange sections of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute represented ones in binary code, while the yellow sections represented zeroes. (So the letter "A" becomes yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-orange...) The Associated Press reports: Clark also included the GPS coordinates for the mission's headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was "super fun," he said Tuesday. Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday's landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday...

Another added touch not widely known until touchdown: Perseverance bears a plaque depicting all five of NASA's Mars rovers in increasing size over the years — similar to the family car decals seen on Earth.

Deputy project manager Matt Wallace promises more so-called hidden Easter eggs...
The official Twitter feed for the rover has already revealed that it's carrying another message hidden in a plaque with a logo of the sun — "Explore as One," written in Morse code.

Some other interesting facts about the rover:

• NASA points out that Perseverance carried a special placard with 10,932,295 names, "stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips."

• Space.com notes that it also carried a small aluminum plate honoring the healthcare workers of the world.

• NASA is encouraging children to code their own version of the helicopter using the visual programming language Scratch.

A team of researchers from Sydney's University of New South Wales and the South Australian Museum have investigated how the reversal of Earth's magnetic pole about 42,000 years could have changed earth's atmosphere. CNN reports: "Using the ancient trees we could measure, and date, the spike in atmospheric radiocarbon levels caused by the collapse of Earth's magnetic field," Chris Turney, a professor at UNSW Science, director of the university's Earth and Sustainability Science Research Center and co-lead author of the study, said in a statement. The team compared their new timescale with site records from caves, ice cores and peat bogs around the world. Researchers found that the reversal led to "pronounced climate change." Their modeling showed that ice sheet and glacier growth in North America and shifts in major wind belts and tropical storm systems could be traced back to the period of the magnetic pole switch, which scientists named the "Adams Event."

"Effectively, the Earth's magnetic field almost disappeared, and it opened the planet up to all these high energy particles from outer space. It would've been an incredibly scary time, almost like the end of days," Turney said. Researchers say the Adams Event could explain many of Earth's evolutionary mysteries, including the extinction of Neanderthals and the sudden widespread appearance of figurative art in caves worldwide... [T]he ionized air would've increased the frequency of electrical storms — something that scientists think caused humans to seek shelter in caves...

In the paper, published in the journal Science, experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards. "This speed — alongside the weakening of Earth's magnetic field by around nine per cent in the past 170 years — could indicate an upcoming reversal," said Alan Cooper, honorary researcher at the South Australian Museum. "If a similar event happened today, the consequences would be huge for modern society. Incoming cosmic radiation would destroy our electric power grids and satellite networks," he said.

Human activity has already pushed carbon in the atmosphere to levels "never seen by humanity before," Cooper said. "A magnetic pole reversal or extreme change in Sun activity would be unprecedented climate change accelerants. We urgently need to get carbon emissions down before such a random event happens again," he added.

necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:

On Friday, Earth's haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity's ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It's called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun's corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2's twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours --17 hours and 35 minutes each way....

While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site's smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe....

NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have turned ordinary sheets of wood into transparent material that is nearly as clear as glass, but stronger and with better insulating properties. It could become an energy efficient building material in the future. CBC.ca reports: Wood is made of two basic ingredients: cellulose, which are tiny fibres, and lignin, which bonds those fibres together to give it strength. Tear a paper towel in half and look closely along the edge. You will see the little cellulose fibres sticking up. Lignin is a glue-like material that bonds the fibres together, a little like the plastic resin in fibreglass or carbon fibre. The lignin also contains molecules called chromophores, which give the wood its brown colour and prevent light from passing through.

Early attempts to make transparent wood involved removing the lignin, but this involved hazardous chemicals, high temperatures and a lot of time, making the product expensive and somewhat brittle. The new technique is so cheap and easy it could literally be done in a backyard. Starting with planks of wood a metre long and one millimetre thick, the scientists simply brushed on a solution of hydrogen peroxide using an ordinary paint brush. When left in the sun, or under a UV lamp for an hour or so, the peroxide bleached out the brown chromophores but left the lignin intact, so the wood turned white.

Next, they infused the wood with a tough transparent epoxy designed for marine use, which filled in the spaces and pores in the wood and then hardened. This made the white wood transparent. You can see a similar effect by taking that same piece of paper towel, dip half of it in water and place it on a patterned surface. The white paper towel will become translucent with light passing through the water and cellulose fibres without being scattered by refraction. The epoxy in the wood does an even better job, allowing 90 per cent of visible light to pass through. The result is a long piece of what looks like glass, with the strength and flexibility of wood. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

A German research organization has developed a magnesium-based "Powerpaste" with an energy density ten times more than current battery technology. Hackaday reports: We've been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus or a truck, it becomes problematic with smaller vehicles, especially ones such as scooters or even full-sized motorcycles. The Fraunhofer Institute wants to run smaller vehicles on magnesium hydride in a paste form that they call POWERPASTE.

The idea is that the paste effectively stores hydrogen at normal temperature and pressure. At 250C, the paste decomposes and releases its hydrogen. While your motorcycle may seem hot when parked in the sun, it isn't getting quite to 250C. Interestingly, the paste only provides half the available hydrogen. The rest is from water added start a reaction to release the hydrogen. Fraunhofer claims the energy density available is greater than that of a 700 bar tank in a conventional hydrogen system and ten times more than current battery technology.

One thing that's attractive is that the paste is easy to store and pump. A gas station, for example, could invest $20-30,000 and dispense the paste from a metal drum to meet low demand and then scale up as needed. A hydrogen pumping setup starts at about $1.2 million. Fraunhofer is building a pilot production plant that will produce about four tons of the material a year.

Avi Loeb, former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University and who chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, writing at Scientific American: It is presumptuous to assume that we are worthy of special attention from advanced species in the Milky Way. We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we're walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Our sun formed at the tail end of the star formation history [PDF] of the universe. Most stars are billions of years older than ours. So much older, in fact that many sunlike stars have already consumed their nuclear fuel and cooled off to a compact Earth-size remnant known as a white dwarf. We also learned recently that of order half [PDF] of all sunlike stars host an Earth-size planet in their habitable zone, allowing for liquid water and for the chemistry of life.

Since the dice of life were rolled in billions of other locations within the Milky Way under similar conditions to those on Earth, life as we know it is likely common. If that is indeed the case, some intelligent species may well be billions of years ahead of us in their technological development. When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. The silence implied by Fermi's paradox ("Where is everybody?") may mean that we are not the most attention-worthy cookies in the jar.

"SpaceX's attempt to reduce the reflectivity of Starlink satellites is working, but not to the degree required by astronomers," reports Gizmodo: Starlink satellites with an anti-reflective coating are half as bright as the standard version, according to research published in The Astrophysical Journal. It's an improvement, but still not good enough, according to the team, led by astronomer Takashi Horiuchi from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan. These "DarkSats," as they're called, also continue to cause problems at other wavelengths of light [and] were included in a batch of satellites launched by SpaceX on January 7, 2020. The new study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of that dark coating...

The scientists found that the "albedo of DarkSat is about a half of that of STARLINK-1113," as they wrote in their paper. That's a decent improvement in the visual spectrum, but still not great. What's more, problems persist at other wavelengths. "The darkening paint on DarkSat certainly halves reflection of sunlight compared to the ordinary Starlink satellites, but [the constellation's] negative impact on astronomical observations still remains," Horiuchi told Physics World. He said the mitigating effect is "good in the UV/optical region" of the spectrum, but "the black coating raises the surface temperature of DarkSat and affects intermediate infrared observations."

A third version of Starlink is supposed to be even dimmer. Called "VisorSats," they feature a sun visor that will "dim the satellites once they reach their operational altitude," according to Sky and Telescope. SpaceX launched some VisorSats last year, but the degree to which their albedo is lessened compared to the original version is still not known, or if these versions will exhibit elevated surface temperatures.

Horiuchi told Physics World that SpaceX should seriously consider lifting the altitude of the Starlink constellation to further reduce the brightness of these objects.
. The article ends with a quote from an astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an expert on satellites. He'd told Gizmodo's reporter back in January of 2020 that "SpaceX is making a good-faith effort to fix the problem," and that he believes the company "can get the satellites fainter than what the naked eye can see."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: In 2010, Austin Sendek, then a physics student at UC Davis, created a petition seeking recognition for prefix "hella-" as an official International System of Units (SI) measurement representing 10^27. "Northern California is home to many influential research institutions, including the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories," he argued. "However, science isn't all that sets Northern California apart from the rest of the world. The area is also the only region in the world currently practicing widespread usage of the English slang 'hella,' which typically means 'very,' or can refer to a large quantity (e.g. 'there are hella stars out tonight')."

To this day, the SI describes prefixes for quantities for up to 10^24. Those with that many bytes have a yottabyte. If you only have 10^21 bytes, you have a zettabyte. There's also exabyte (10^18), petabyte (10^15), terabyte (10^12), gigabyte(10^9), and so on. Support for "hella-" would allow you to talk about hellabytes of data, he argues, pointing out that this would make the number of atoms in 12 kg of carbon-12 would be simplified from 600 yottaatoms to 0.6 hellaatoms. Similarly, the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts, rather than 300 yottawatts. [...] The soonest [a proposal for a "hella-" SI could be officially adopted] is in November 2022, at the quadrennial meeting of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM)'s General Conference on Weight and Measures, where changes to the SI usually must be agreed upon. The report notes that Google customized its search engine in 2010 to let you convert "bytes to hellabytes." A year later, Wolfram Alpha added support for "hella-" calculations.

"Sendek said 'hellabyte' initially started as a joke with some college friends but became a more genuine concern as he looked into how measurements get defined and as his proposal garnered support," reports The Register. He believes it could be useful for astronomical measurements.

Microsoft is planning a "sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows" that is designed to signal to users of the operating system that "Windows is BACK." From a report: That's according to a job listing posted by Microsoft recently, advertising for a software engineering role in the Windows Core User Experiences team: "On this team, you'll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers." Microsoft quietly removed references to this "sweeping visual rejuvenation" this morning, after several Windows enthusiasts spotted the job listing over the weekend.

Since 1976 "Project Censored," a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying "the news that didn't make the news," the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year's most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they'd presciently warned that the media was ignoring the issue of net neutrality.

But their latest list of underreported stories includes this disturbing headline: "Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs." Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.

India's unlicensed medical practitioners, known as "quack" doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. "Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous overprescription," a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter... [P]atients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical "professionals" have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics.

In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia. Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, "This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken...."

Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.
The site's list of the top 25 censored stories of 2019 - 2020 also includes:

• Growing interest in so-called "public" banks, "not legally obligated to maximize profits, as private banks are; instead, public banks are mandated to serve their communities."

• How rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact nuclear power plants, "posing increased risks of nuclear disasters."

• Proposals to revitalize journalism through public funding.

• How the U.S. military represents "a massive, hidden contributor to the climate crisis."

Neptune boasts some of the strangest weather in the solar system. The sun's eighth planet holds the record for the fastest winds observed on any world, with speeds cutting through the atmosphere upward of 1,100 miles per hour, or 1.5 times the speed of sound. Scientists still don't know exactly why its atmosphere is so tumultuous. Their latest glimpse of Neptune provided even more reason to be confused. From a report: The Hubble Space Telescope identified a storm in 2018, a dark spot some 4,600 miles across. Since that time, it appears to have drifted toward the equator but then swooped back up north, according to the latest Hubble observations. It also has a smaller companion storm, nicknamed Dark Spot Jr., that scientists think might be a chunk that broke off the main storm. These inky vortexes stand out against the dizzying cerulean blue of the planet, but while they're dazzling to see, their life spans are short, making them even more challenging to study.

This is not the first time Neptune's dark spots have behaved so strangely. When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet in 1989, (still the only spacecraft to do so) it observed two storms. One was the original Dark Spot, a large vortex about the size of the Earth. It too had a companion, a smaller, fast moving storm nicknamed Scooter. The first observed Dark Spot also seemed to move south and then back to the north. "When we were tracking the great dark spot with Voyager, we saw it oscillating up and down in longitude," said Heidi Hammel, a member of the imaging team of the Voyager 2 space probe and currently the vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. "We had enough time on Voyager, that we were able to track the feature for something like four to five months leading up to the flyby. That storm was huge, a big monster," as big as planet Earth.

schwit1 quotes Intelligent Living: Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company's chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.

Plenty's climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.

Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren't grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research(KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. Phys.Org reports: On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KEF) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds with an ion-temperature higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign. It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds)

To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures. In its 2020 experiment, the KSTAR improved the performance of the Internal Transport Barrier(ITB) mode, one of the next generation plasma operation modes developed last year and succeeded in maintaining the plasma state for a long period of time, overcoming the existing limits of the ultra-high-temperature plasma operation.

Astronomers behind the most extensive search yet for alien life are investigating an intriguing radio wave emission that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. From a report: The narrow beam of radio waves was picked up during 30 hours of observations by the Parkes telescope in Australia in April and May last year, the Guardian understands. Analysis of the beam has been under way for some time and scientists have yet to identify a terrestrial culprit such as ground-based equipment or a passing satellite. It is usual for astronomers on the $100m Breakthrough Listen project to spot strange blasts of radio waves with the Parkes telescope or the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, but all so far have been attributed to human-made interference or natural sources. The latest "signal" is likely to have a mundane explanation too, but the direction of the narrow beam, around 980MHz, and an apparent shift in its frequency said to be consistent with the movement of a planet have added to the tantalising nature of the finding. Scientists are now preparing a paper on the beam, named BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen, the project to search for evidence of life in space, the Guardian understands. The beam that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth, has not been spotted since the initial observation, according to an individual in the astronomy community who requested anonymity because the work is ongoing. "It is the first serious candidate since the 'Wow! signal'," they said.

In Huntsville, Alabama, there is a room with green walls and a green ceiling. Dangling down the center is a fishing line attached to a motor mounted to the ceiling, which moves a procession of guns tied to the translucent line. From a report: The staff at Arcarithm bought each of the 10 best-selling firearm models in the U.S.: Rugers, Glocks, Sig Sauers. Pistols and long guns are dangled from the line. The motor rotates them around the room, helping a camera mounted to a mobile platform photograph them from multiple angles. "It's just like a movie set," said Arcarithm president and CEO Randy E. Riley. This process creates about 5,000 images of each gun floating ethereally. Arcarithm's computer programmers then replace the green backdrop with different environments, like fields, forests, and city streets. They add rain or snow or fog or sun. A program then randomly distorts the images. The result is 30,000 to 50,000 images of the same gun, from multiple angles, in different synthetic settings and of varying degrees of visibility.

The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America's 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries. Among the other sellers are Omnilert, a longtime vendor of safety notification software, and newcomers ZeroEyes, Defendry, and Athena Securities. Some cities employ a surveillance system of acoustic sensors to instantly detect gunshots. These companies promise to do one better and save precious minutes by alerting police or security personnel before the first shot is fired.

Long-time Slashdot reader BoredStiff writes: An energy Sankey diagram [where the width of arrows is proportional to flow rates] was published today by the University of Chicago, and shows the history of the American energy system in chart form, from 1800 to 2019.
The Atlantic explains: It is the first attempt to put so much information about U.S. energy history in one place. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. energy system, measured in watts per capita. The left side of the chart shows where energy is coming from (coal, natural gas, or petroleum) and the right side shows what it's being used for (transportation, agriculture, or home lighting and heating)...

[I]t has a lot to teach us about how the energy system got to be the way it is today — and how it might change, and be made to change, in the future... The half century from 1800 to 1850 saw the country devour biomass, most of it in the form of firewood and animal feed. In the 1870s, biomass gave way to the first fossil fuels: coal and, to a lesser extent, petroleum... By the 1910s, coal was dominant.... In the 1920s, it began to fade from the economy, replaced by natural gas, electricity, and — in the transportation sector — petroleum (in the form of gasoline). This was the age of cars and electrified Sun Belt suburbs — and it lasted 50 years, until the energy crisis of the 1970s arrived and capped energy use. Since 1973, per capita energy use hasn't increased.

In recent years, you can see natural gas driving out coal from the electricity sector. It was getting a handle on that change, actually, that led the project's leader to start working on it in the first place. "The changes that are happening in the electricity sector now — changes that are as large as any energy transition we've seen — are difficult to grasp... without animating the data," Elisabeth Moyer, an atmospheric-chemistry professor at the University of Chicago who created the project, told me...

Emily Grubert, an engineering professor at Georgia Tech, noted that nearly all of the transitions depicted were accidental or the result of market forces. It's possible that the transition to zero-carbon energy could be faster, she said, because it will be intentional.

hcs_$reboot shares a remarkable new theory from Larry M. Silverberg, an aerospace engineering professor at North Carolina State University (with colleague Jeffrey Eischen). They're proposing that matter is not made of particles (or even waves), as was long thought, but fragments of energy.

[W]hile the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the universe, the rules break down at the largest and tiniest scales. Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity. But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe... Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave....

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there were only a limited number of ways to describe a concentration of energy that flows. Of those, we found just one that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow. We named it a fragment of energy... Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the math necessary to solve physics problems... More than 100 [years] ago, Einstein had turned to two legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift — or precession — in Mercury's orbit, and the tiny bending of light as it passes the Sun... In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got the same answers as those predicted by the theory of general relativity. We were stunned.

Our initial work demonstrated how a new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the enormous to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong. The fragment could be a single potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically — and update the way people think about the building blocks of the universe.