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OCTOBER 1, 2020
A Rogue Earth-Mass Planet Has Been Discovered Freely Floating in the Milky Way Without a Star

https://www.universetoday.com/14809...ely-floating-in-the-milky-way-without-a-star/
If a solar system is a family, then some planets leave home early. Whether they want to or not. Once they’ve left the gravitational embrace of their family, they’re pretty much destined to drift through interstellar space forever, unbound to any star.

Astronomers like to call these drifters “rogue planets,” and they’re getting better at finding them. A team of astronomers have found one of these drifting rogues that’s about the same mass as Mars or Earth.

Finding something in deep space that emits no light of its own is extremely challenging. But two organizations are doing just that. They’re the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) collaboration and the KMTN (Korean Microlensing Telescope Network) collaboration.

Theoretical work shows that there could be billions, or even trillions, of free-floating planets in the Milky Way. In their work, the authors lists the ways these planets can end up orphaned: Planet-planet scattering; dynamical interactions between giant planets that lead to orbital disruption of smaller, inner planets; interactions between the stars in binary or trinary systems and star clusters; stellar fly-bys; and the evolution of the host star past the main sequence.

Microlensing offers a method of finding these small rogue planets. But it’s difficult. It’s not that they’re so dim that’s the problem. It’s that the microlensing events for bodies this small are on a very short timescale due to their size. The newly-discovered planet, which has been named “OGLE-2016-BLG-1928,” was discovered in a micro-lensing event which lasted only 41.5 minutes. That’s not much time for detailed data to be gathered.

Only four other small rogue planets like this one have been found before, each one in a short timescale micro-lensing event. Together, these events provide “strong evidence for a population of rogue planets in the Milky Way,” the authors write.
 
Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet (with major drug interactions)
From its name, to its hazy origins, to its drug interactions, there’s a lot going on beneath that thick rind.
OCTOBER 6, 2020

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and-drug-interactions
IN 1989, DAVID BAILEY, A researcher in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his career, in his lab in London, Ontario. Follow-up testing confirmed his findings, and today there is not really any doubt that he was correct. “The hard part about it was that most people didn’t believe our data, because it was so unexpected,” he says. “A food had never been shown to produce a drug interaction like this, as large as this, ever.”

That food was grapefruit, a seemingly ordinary fruit that is, in truth, anything but ordinary. Right from the moment of its discovery, the grapefruit has been a true oddball. Its journey started in a place where it didn’t belong, and ended up in a lab in a place where it doesn’t grow. Hell, even the name doesn’t make any sense.

Because those base fruits are all native to Asia, the vast majority of hybrid citrus fruits are also from Asia. Grapefruit, however, is not. In fact, the grapefruit was first found a world away, in Barbados, probably in the mid-1600s. The early days of the grapefruit are plagued by mystery. Citrus trees had been planted casually by Europeans all over the West Indies, with hybrids springing up all over the place, and very little documentation of who planted what, and which mixed with which. Citrus, see, naturally hybridizes when two varieties are planted near each other. Careful growers, even back in the 1600s, used tactics like spacing and grafting (in which part of one tree is attached to the rootstock of another) to avoid hybridizing. In the West Indies, at the time, nobody bothered. They just planted stuff.

Sometimes it didn’t work very well. Many citrus varieties, due to being excessively inbred, don’t even create a fruiting tree when grown from seed. But other times, random chance could result in something special. The grapefruit is, probably, one of these. The word “probably” is warranted there, because none of the history of the grapefruit is especially clear. Part of the problem is that the word “grapefruit” wasn’t even recorded, at least not in any surviving documents, until the 1830s.

Speaking of all these names, let’s discuss the word “grapefruit.” It’s commonly stated that the word comes from the fact that grapefruits grow in bunches, like grapes. There’s a pretty decent chance that this isn’t true. In 1664, a Dutch physician named Wouter Schouden visited Barbados and described the citrus he sampled there as “tasting like unripe grapes.” In 1814, John Lunan, a British plantation and slave owner from Jamaica, reported that this fruit was named “on account of its resemblance in flavour to the grape.”

This is largely guesswork, almost all of it, because citrus is a delightfully chaotic category of fruit. It hybridizes so easily that there are undoubtedly thousands, maybe more, separate varieties of citrus in the wild and in cultivation. Some of these, like the grapefruit, clementine, or Meyer lemon, catch on and become popular. But trying to figure out exactly where they came from, especially if they weren’t created recently in a fruit-breeding lab, is incredibly difficult.

[snip]

Eventually, with Bailey leading the effort, the mechanism became clear. The human body has mechanisms to break down stuff that ends up in the stomach. The one involved here is cytochrome P450, a group of enzymes that are tremendously important for converting various substances to inactive forms. Drugmakers factor this into their dosage formulation as they try to figure out what’s called the bioavailability of a drug, which is how much of a medication gets to your bloodstream after running the gauntlet of enzymes in your stomach. For most drugs, it is surprisingly little—sometimes as little as 10 percent.

Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins permanently take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up its hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome P450s. This can take over 12 hours.

This rather suddenly takes away one of the body’s main defense mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you actually need, because so little will actually make it to your bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100 percent. You’re overdosing.

And it does not take an excessive amount of grapefruit juice to have this effect: Less than a single cup can be enough, and the effect doesn’t seem to change as long as you hit that minimum.

None of this is a mystery, at this point, and it’s shockingly common. Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some of the medications that research indicates get screwed up by grapefruit:

Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium)
Amphetamines (Adderall and Ritalin)
Anti-anxiety SSRIs (Zoloft and Paxil)
Cholesterol-lowering statins (Lipitor and Crestor)
Erectile-dysfunction drugs (Cialis and Viagra)
Various over-the-counter meds (Tylenol, Allegra, and Prilosec)
And about a hundred others.

9449105_700x700.png
 
This is very cool and the image processing obstacle avoidance results extremely impressive. This is an open source project!

15 Oct 2020
How Intel's OpenBot Wants to Make Robots Out of Smartphones
Intel talks to us about why OpenBot has a future we should believe in

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/intel-openbot-robots-smartphones
You could make a pretty persuasive argument that the smartphone represents the single fastest area of technological progress we’re going to experience for the foreseeable future. Every six months or so, there’s something with better sensors, more computing power, and faster connectivity. Many different areas of robotics are benefiting from this on a component level, but over at Intel Labs, they’re taking a more direct approach with a project called OpenBot that turns US $50 worth of hardware and your phone into a mobile robot that can support “advanced robotics workloads such as person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments.”

Openbot
Turning Smartphones into Robots

https://www.openbot.org/
 
Twenty years of the International Space Station – but was it worth it?
25 Oct 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/science...ternational-space-station-but-was-it-worth-it
Planetary science expert Professor Ian Crawford of Birkbeck, University of London, believes it was. “The ISS is a fantastic example of high-profile international cooperation at a time when the world desperately needs examples of activities that can bring people and nations together. And learning how to live and work in space will stand us in good stead as we prepare to return to the Moon and possibly send people to Mars.”

Other scientists take a different stance, however. “There is no way you could justify the vast sums the have been spent on building the ISS,” said the astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees. “For a start, the scientific returns have been meagre. We have learned a bit about how the body reacts to spending long periods in space, and we have grown a few crystals in zero gravity, but that is in no way commensurate to the tens of billions of dollars that have spent on the ISS. Really, the station only makes news when its toilets get blocked or an astronaut sings while floating about with a guitar.”

Nasa’s money would have been better spent on launching robot missions to other planets or constructing orbiting observatories, Rees added – a view that is backed by the physicist and Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin. “The only interesting science done on the ISS has been the study of cosmic rays by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but astronauts played no role in its operation,” he told the Observer. “It could have been placed in orbit much more cheaply by an unmanned mission.”
 
ISS Crew Just Found the Elusive Air Leak Using Floating Tea Leaves
19 Oct 2020

https://www.sciencealert.com/iss-crew-just-used-floating-tea-leaves-to-find-an-elusive-air-leak
The International Space Station has been leaking an unusual amount of air since September 2019.

At first, crew members held off on troubleshooting the issue, since the leak wasn't major. But in August, the leak rate increased, prompting astronauts and cosmonauts on board the orbiting laboratory to start trying to locate its source in earnest.

...in September 2019, the standard leak rate increased slightly. That wasn't considered any major risk, but in August 2020, that already elevated rate increased fivefold, from 0.6 to 3.1 pounds of air per day, according to Russian news agency Ria Novosti.

So over the last two months, crew members hunted for the leak by isolating sections of the station and monitoring their pressure changes.

Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, announced on Thursday that crew members had finally pinpointed the leak's location after devising an unusual test: They let tea leaves guide their search.

Cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin released a few leaves from a tea bag in the transfer chamber of the Zvezda Service Module the section of the station's Russian segment that houses a kitchen, sleeping quarters, and bathroom. Then the crew sealed the chamber off by closing its hatches, and monitored the tea leaves on video cameras as they floated in microgravity.

The leaves slowly floated toward a scratch in the wall near the module's communication equipment evidence that it was a crack through which air was escaping.

The crew has since patched the leak using Kapton tape, Roscosmos reported on Monday.

How a $2 Toothbrush Saved the ISS and Other Unbelievable Space Hacks

 
Apollo 11 Launch 70mm - DAIN App Video Enhance AI

Newly released 70mm film footage of the Apollo 11 launch. The original film footage of the launch was upscaled to 3264x3264 resolution, and the frame rate doubled to 96fps for super slow motion playback.

 
This channel is fantastic and deserves many more subscribers than it has:

APOLLO 7 - Intravehicular Activity [VR 4K 360º]



Launch:

 
OCTOBER 11, 2020
Fake asteroid? NASA expert IDs mystery object as old rocket

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-fake-asteroid-nasa-expert-ids.html
Instead of a cosmic rock, the newly discovered object appears to be an old rocket from a failed moon-landing mission 54 years ago that's finally making its way back home, according to NASA's leading asteroid expert. Observations should help nail its identity.

Chodas speculates that asteroid 2020 SO, as it is formally known, is actually the Centaur upper rocket stage that successfully propelled NASA's Surveyor 2 lander to the moon in 1966 before it was discarded. The lander ended up crashing into the moon after one of its thrusters failed to ignite on the way there. The rocket, meanwhile, swept past the moon and into orbit around the sun as intended junk, never to be seen again—until perhaps now.

A telescope in Hawaii last month discovered the mystery object heading our way while doing a search intended to protect our planet from doomsday rocks. The object promptly was added to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center's tally of asteroids and comets found in our solar system, just 5,000 shy of the 1 million mark.

The object is estimated to be roughly 26 feet (8 meters) based on its brightness. That's in the ballpark of the old Centaur, which would be less than 32 feet (10 meters) long including its engine nozzle and 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter.

The object is also in the same plane as Earth, not tilted above or below, another red flag. Asteroids usually zip by at odd angles. Lastly, it's approaching Earth at 1,500 mph (2,400 kph), slow by asteroid standards.

As the object gets closer, astronomers should be able to better chart its orbit and determine how much it's pushed around by the radiation and thermal effects of sunlight. If it's an old Centaur—essentially a light empty can—it will move differently than a heavy space rock less susceptible to outside forces.

That's how astronomers normally differentiate between asteroids and space junk like abandoned rocket parts, since both appear merely as moving dots in the sky. There likely are dozens of fake asteroids out there, but their motions are too imprecise or jumbled to confirm their artificial identity, said Chodas.
 
The Strange Science of Neutrinos



Incredible facility.



5b2121431ae6621d008b4d53
 
I think I may have already posted here about this topic, but not this great of an explanation of it:

Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser: Shocking Results may show Future Affects Past
12 Apr 2019



Related topic:

On testing the simulation theory
June 8, 2017

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.00058.pdf
 
Interestingly, if he hadn't become well know as the world authority on electricity at that time, we may not have so easily have gotten the essential French military assistance and hardware aid during the revolution.

The SHOCKING Truth About Ben Franklin and the Kite

 
NOVEMBER 16, 2020
Mars is getting a new robotic meteorologist [hopefully... the significant changes to the EDL system to allow far more accurate landing site targeting make me nervous; just something more that needs to go 100% right; don't even ask me about the Rube Goldberg complexity on-orbit deployment sequence of the multi-billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope... - W]

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-mars-robotic-meteorologist.html
The instrument behind the weather data is called MEDA—short for the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer. Part of its goal is to gather the basics: temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, and relative humidity. Models of the temperature at Perseverance's landing site range from an average of minus 126 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 88 degrees Celsius) at night to about minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) in the afternoon.

Together with weather instruments aboard NASA's Curiosity rover and InSight lander, the three spacecraft will create "the first meteorological network on another planet," said Jose Antonio Rodriguez-Manfredi, MEDA principal investigator with the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) at the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aeroespacial in Madrid, Spain.

But a key difference between MEDA and its predecessors is that it will also measure the amount, shape, and size of dust particles in the Martian atmosphere. Dust is a big consideration for any surface mission on Mars. It gets all over everything, including spacecraft and any solar panels they may have. It also drives chemical processes both on the surface and in the atmosphere, and it affects temperature and weather. The Perseverance team wants to learn more about these interactions; doing so will help the team planning operations for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter as well.

"Radiation is probably the most extreme condition for the astronauts," said Rodriguez-Manfredi. "The suits protecting the astronauts from this radiation will be crucial."

To that end, MEDA's SkyCam will photograph and make videos of the sky and clouds while monitoring sky brightness in a variety of wavelengths to help us better understand the radiation environment on Mars.

"We'll have our own camera to monitor those clouds and the opacity—and the amount of dust or other aerosols in the atmosphere that may be changing the intensity of the solar radiation," said Rodriguez-Manfredi. "We'll be able to see how the amount of dust in the atmosphere changes on an hourly basis."

SkyCam is a sky-facing camera aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. As part of MEDA, the rover's set of weather instruments, SkyCam will take images and video of clouds passing in the Martian sky:

1-marsisgettin.jpg


One of two wind sensors springs out of the mast on NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. These sensors are part of Perseverance's weather instrumentation, called MEDA. [note how the sensor is stowed prior to landing; one wind sensor on Curiosity was damaged by debris blown around by the thrusters on the Sky Crane; with Perseverance, they've also angled out those thrusters slightly more - W]

marsisgettin.gif


-------------

An obvious question that should have occurred to anyone reading about a fixed, continuously upward facing camera would be how in the heck do you keep the camera's window clean. No article I could find answered that question. Only this PDF did. The answer - they don't:

Dust accumulation on the window will affect all images. Cross-calibration with Mastcam-Z will be done for both the optical depth measurement (frequently) and for creating sky flat fields from time to time in order to compensate for dust.

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/pdf/2282.pdf
Dust is a big issue on Mars:

ytt1eht0xk4fgspylavg.jpg
 
Aerojet General Missile and Rocket Engines Promo Film

Tons of very cool stuff. I'd love to know how much of the impressive infrastructure shown is still standing or in use.

 
Project HARP: America's Quest to Shoot Its Way Into Outer Space

 
How To Make Ruby in a Microwave

Don't do this in your home microwave used for food. Use a dedicated "experiment" microwave only in a well ventilated area.



I had no idea about cheap, readily available microwave kilns which were found unsuitable for ruby creation, but are still very interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=microwave+kiln
 
More for demonstrating the concept than for anything practical. Clever use of a vaping device for smoke. Still has unwanted turbulent flow as evidenced by the disrupted smoke trails even before reaching the airfoil. Any ideas about the possible causes of that? I'd guess that it's at least partly because the tips of the smoke straws aren't tapered to a point at the smoke emitting end causing a spiral turbulence at the end of the straw.

DESKTOP WIND TUNNEL

https://hackaday.com/2020/11/20/desktop-wind-tunnel-brings-aerospace-engineering-to-the-home-gamer/
...five tubes [straws] pipe in smoke from an vape pen, driven into the chamber by an aquarium pump. There’s a strip of LEDs along the roof of the tunnel, with a baffle to prevent the light shining on the black rear wall of the chamber for the best possible contrast. The slow-motion video after the break shows the effectiveness of the setup.

 
Newly discovered ghostly circles in the sky can’t be explained by current theories, and astronomers are excited
1 Dec 2020

https://theconversation.com/wtf-new...t-theories-and-astronomers-are-excited-142812
In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she’d found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn’t fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labelled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna’s.

The ghostly ORC1 (blue/green fuzz), on a backdrop of the galaxies at optical wavelengths. There’s an orange galaxy at the centre of the ORC, but we don’t know whether it’s part of the ORC, or just a chance coincidence:

file-20200721-37-1tl0rt3.png
 
"James Web Space Telescope, that started development in 1996 for a launch in 2007 on a $500 million budget, its now looking at a launch in 2021 and the budget has reached $10 billion." And it's incredibly complex deployment process worries me. Too much to go wrong in a distant orbit.

On the other hand, thanks NRO:

NASA's Mega Hubble - The Roman Space Telescope

 
The insane amount of work, innovation, and massive infrastructure creation it took to do this only seven years after starting. Just incredible to those of us who know the details.

Apollo 11 in 24fps enhanced: Neil and Buzz landing on the Moon

 

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