"A familiar shadow looms in a fresh image of the heart of the nearby galaxy M87," reports Science magazine.

"It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape, one generated by a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun." But compared with a previous image from the network of radio dishes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the new one reveals a subtle shift in the bright ring surrounding the shadow, which could provide clues to how gases churn around the black hole. "We can see that shift now," says team member Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam. "We can start to use that." The new detail has also whetted astronomers' desire for a proposed expansion of the EHT, which would deliver even sharper images of distant black holes.

The new picture, published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from data collected 1 year after the observing campaign that led to the first-ever picture of a black hole, revealed in 2019 and named as Science's Breakthrough of the Year. The dark center of the image is the same size as in the original image, confirming that the image depicts physical reality and is not an artifact. "It tells us it wasn't a fluke," says Martin Hardcastle, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire who was not involved in the study. The black hole's mass would not have grown appreciably in 1 year, so the comparison also supports the idea that a black hole's size is determined by its mass alone. In the new image, however, the brightest part of a ring surrounding the black hole has shifted counterclockwise by about 30 degrees.

That could be because of random churning in the disk of material that swirls around the black hole's equator. It could also be associated with fluctuations in one of the jets launched from the black hole's poles — a sign that the jet isn't aligned with the black hole's spin axis, but precesses around it like a wobbling top. That would be "kind of exciting," Markoff says. "The only way to know is to keep taking pictures...."

[T]he team wants to add more telescopes to the network, which would further sharpen its images and enable it to see black holes in more distant galaxies.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

The Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of GN-z11 in 2016 marked it as the most distant galaxy known at that time, notable for its unexpected luminosity despite its ancient formation just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Now, in a paper published in Nature, astrophysicist Roberto Maiolino proposes that this brightness could be due to a supermassive black hole, challenging current understanding of early black hole formation and growth. NPR reports: This wasn't just any black hole. First -- assuming that the black hole started out small -- it could be devouring matter at a ferocious rate. And it would have needed to do so to reach its massive size. "This black hole is essentially eating the [equivalent of] an entire Sun every five years," says Maiolino. "It's actually much higher than we thought could be feasible for these black holes." Hence the word "vigorous" in the paper's title. Second, the black hole is 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun, and it was in place just 400 million years after the dawn of the universe. "It is essentially not possible to grow such a massive black hole so fast so early in the universe," Maiolino says. "Essentially, there is not enough time according to classical theories. So one has to invoke alternative scenarios."

Here's scenario one -- rather than starting out small, perhaps supermassive black holes in the early universe were simply born big due to the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas. Scenario two is that maybe early stars collapsed to form a sea of smaller black holes, which could have then merged or swallowed matter way faster than we thought, causing the resulting black hole to grow quickly. Or perhaps it's some combination of both. In addition, it's possible that this black hole is harming the growth of the galaxy GN-z11. That's because black holes radiate energy as they feed. At such a high rate of feasting, this energy could sweep away the gas of the host galaxy. And since stars are made from gas, it could quench star formation, slowly strangling the galaxy. Not to mention that without gas, the black hole wouldn't have anything to feed on and it too would die.

Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College, writing for The New Yorker: Recently, statistical modelling has taken on a new kind of importance as the engine of artificial intelligence -- specifically in the form of the deep neural networks that power, among other things, large language models, such as OpenAI's G.P.T.s. These systems sift vast corpora of text to create a statistical model of written expression, realized as the likelihood of given words occurring in particular contexts. Rather than trying to encode a principled theory of how we produce writing, they are a vertiginous form of curve fitting; the largest models find the best ways to connect hundreds of thousands of simple mathematical neurons, using trillions of parameters.They create a vast data structure akin to a tangle of Christmas lights whose on-off patterns attempt to capture a chunk of historical word usage. The neurons derive from mathematical models of biological neurons originally formulated by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, in a landmark 1943 paper, titled "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." McCulloch and Pitts argued that brain activity could be reduced to a model of simple, interconnected processing units, receiving and sending zeros and ones among themselves based on relatively simple rules of activation and deactivation.

The McCulloch-Pitts model was intended as a foundational step in a larger project, spearheaded by McCulloch, to uncover a biological foundation of psychiatry. McCulloch and Pitts never imagined that their cartoon neurons could be trained, using data, so that their on-off states linked to certain properties in that data. But others saw this possibility, and early machine-learning researchers experimented with small networks of mathematical neurons, effectively creating mathematical models of the neural architecture of simple brains, not to do psychiatry but to categorize data. The results were a good deal less than astonishing. It wasn't until vast amounts of good data -- like text -- became readily available that computer scientists discovered how powerful their models could be when implemented on vast scales. The predictive and generative abilities of these models in many contexts is beyond remarkable. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of understanding just how they do what they do. A new field, called interpretability (or X-A.I., for "explainable" A.I.), is effectively the neuroscience of artificial neural networks.

This is an instructive origin story for a field of research. The field begins with a focus on a basic and well-defined underlying mechanism -- the activity of a single neuron. Then, as the technology scales, it grows in opacity; as the scope of the field's success widens, so does the ambition of its claims. The contrast with climate modelling is telling. Climate models have expanded in scale and reach, but at each step the models must hew to a ground truth of historical, measurable fact. Even models of covid or elections need to be measured against external data. The success of deep learning is different. Trillions of parameters are fine-tuned on larger and larger corpora that uncover more and more correlations across a range of phenomena. The success of this data-driven approach isn't without danger. We run the risk of conflating success on well-defined tasks with an understanding of the underlying phenomenon -- thought -- that motivated the models in the first place.

Part of the problem is that, in many cases, we actually want to use models as replacements for thinking. That's the raison detre of modelling -- substitution. It's useful to recall the story of Icarus. If only he had just done his flying well below the sun. The fact that his wings worked near sea level didn't mean they were a good design for the upper atmosphere. If we don't understand how a model works, then we aren't in a good position to know its limitations until something goes wrong. By then it might be too late. Eugene Wigner, the physicist who noted the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," restricted his awe and wonder to its ability to describe the inanimate world. Mathematics proceeds according to its own internal logic, and so it's striking that its conclusions apply to the physical universe; at the same time, how they play out varies more the further that we stray from physics. Math can help us shine a light on dark worlds, but we should look critically, always asking why the math is so effective, recognizing where it isn't, and pushing on the places in between.

necro81 writes: ULA's Vulcan rocket, many years in development, had a successful first launch this morning from Cape Canaveral. The expendable rocket, which uses two methane-fueled BE-4 engines from Blue Origin in its first stage, is the successor to the Delta and Atlas-V launch vehicles.

Years overdue, and with a packed manifest for future launches, Vulcan is critical to the ULA's continued existence. The payload on this first mission is called Peregrine -- a lunar lander from Astrobotic. Unfortunately, Peregrine has suffered an anomaly some hours into flight; it is unclear whether the mission can recover. UPDATE: According to Reuters, Peregrine's propulsion system experienced issues hours after separating from Vulcan, "preventing the spacecraft from angling itself toward the sun for power."

"While mission engineers regained control, the faulty propulsion system is losing valuable propellant, forcing Astrobotic to consider 'alternative mission profiles,' suggesting a moon landing is no longer achievable," reports Reuters.

In the most recent update (#5) on X, Astrobotic said in a statement: "We've received the first image from Peregrine in space! The camera utilized is mounted atop a payload deck and shows Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) in the foreground. The disturbance of the MLI is the first visual clue that aligns with out telemetry data that points to a propulsion system anomaly. Nonetheless, the spacecraft's battery is now fully charged, and we are using Peregrine's existing power to perform as many payload and spacecraft operations as possible. At this time, the majority of our Peregrine mission team has been awake and working diligently for more than 24 hours. We ask for your patience as we reassess incoming data so we can provide ongoing updates later this evening."

The BBC checks in on "the pioneers of space exploration — the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s." Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman died within a few days of each other late last year. Now only eight people who have voyaged beyond the Earth's orbit remain. Who are they, and what are their stories...? There are only four people still alive who have walked on the Moon — Charlie Duke is one of them. He did it aged 36, making him the youngest person to set foot on the lunar surface... Charlie Duke now lives outside San Antonio, Texas, with Dorothy, to whom he has been married for 60 years....

Jim Lovell is one of only three men to have travelled to the Moon twice, and following Frank Borman's death in November 2023, he became the oldest living astronaut....

After leaving Nasa in 1975, [Harrison Schmitt] was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of New Mexico, but only served one term. Since then he has worked as a consultant in various industries as well as continuing in academia.
And when confronted by a man claiming Apollo 11 was an elaborate lie, 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin "punched him on the jaw." Despite struggles in later life, he never lost his thirst for adventure and joined expeditions to both the North and South Poles, the latter at the age of 86. While embracing his celebrity, he has remained an advocate for the space programme, especially the need to explore Mars.

"I don't think we should just go there and come back — we did that with Apollo," he says.
Last 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married — and thanked his fans for remembering his birthday. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun."

"[F]or years it was written off," writes CNN. " 'The economics were just way out,' said Martin Soltau, CEO of the UK-based company Space Solar.

"That may now be changing as the cost of launching satellites falls sharply, solar and robotics technology advances swiftly, and the need for abundant clean energy to replace planet-heating fossil fuels becomes more urgent." There's a "nexus of different technologies coming together right now just when we need it," said Craig Underwood, emeritus professor of spacecraft engineering at the University of Surrey in the U.K. The problem is, these technologies would need to be deployed at a scale unlike anything ever done before... "The big stumbling block has been simply the sheer cost of putting a power station into orbit." Over the last decade, that has begun to change as companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin started developing reusable rockets. Today's launch costs at around $1,500 per kilogram are about 30 times less than in the Space Shuttle era of the early 1980s.

And while launching thousands of tons of material into space sounds like it would have a huge carbon footprint, space solar would likely have a footprint at least comparable to terrestrial solar per unit of energy, if not a smaller, because of its increased efficiency as sunlight is available nearly constantly, said Mamatha Maheshwarappa, payload systems lead at UK Space Agency. Some experts go further. Underwood said the carbon footprint of space-based solar would be around half that of a terrestrial solar farm producing the same power, even with the rocket launch...

There is still a huge gulf between concept and commercialization. We know how to build a satellite, and we know how to build a solar array, Maheshwarappa said. "What we don't know is how to build something this big in space..." Scientists also need to figure out how to use AI and robotics to construct and maintain these structures in space. "The enabling technologies are still in a very low technology readiness," Maheshwarappa said. Then there's regulating this new energy system, to ensure the satellites are built sustainably, there's no debris risk, and they have an end-of-life plan, as well as to determine where rectenna sites should be located. Public buy-in could be another huge obstacle, Maheshwarappa said. There can be an instinctive fear when it comes to beaming power from space.

But such fears are unfounded, according to some experts. The energy density at the center of the rectenna would be about a quarter of the midday sun. "It is no different than standing in front of a heat lamp," Hajimiri said.
The article argues that governments and companies around the world "believe there is huge promise in space-based solar to help meet burgeoning demand for abundant, clean energy and tackle the climate crisis." And they cite several specific examples:

• In 2020 the U.S. Naval Research Lab launched a module on an orbital test vehicle, to test solar hardware in space conditions.

• This year Caltech electrical engineering professor led a team that successfully launched a 30-centimeter prototype equipped with transmitters — and successfully beamed detectable energy down to earth.

• In June the U.K. government announced over $5 million in funding to universities and tech companies "to drive forward innovation" in the space-based solar sector.

• The U.S. Air Force Research Lab plans to launch a small demonstrator in 2025.

• Europe's its Solaris program aims to prove "the technical and political viability of space-based solar, in preparation for a possible decision in 2025 to launch a full development program."

• One Chinese spacecraft designer and manufacturer hopes to send a solar satellite into low orbit in 2028 and high orbit by 2030, according to a 2022 South China Morning News report.

"The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago when a city-size asteroid struck a shallow sea off the coast of what is now Mexico," writes CNN.

"But exactly how the mass extinction of 75% of the species on Earth unfolded in the years that followed the cataclysmic impact has remained unclear." Previous research suggested that sulfur released during the impact, which left the 112-mile-wide (180-kilometer-wide) Chicxulub crater, and soot from wildfires triggered a global winter, and temperatures plunged. However, a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests that fine dust made from pulverized rock thrown up into Earth's atmosphere in the wake of the impact likely played a greater role. This dust blocked the sun to an extent that plants were unable to photosynthesize, a biological process critical for life, for almost two years afterward.

"Photosynthesis shutting down for almost two years after impact caused severe challenges (for life)," said lead study author and planetary scientist Cem Berk Senel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "It collapsed the food web, creating a chain reaction of extinctions."

To reach their findings, scientists developed a new computer model to simulate the global climate after the asteroid strike. The model was based on published information on Earth's climate at that point in time, as well as new data from sediment samples taken from the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota that captured a 20-year period during the aftermath of the strike.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: "(The rocks) in the box right now are about 1,600 degrees Celsius," Andrew Ponec said, standing next to a thermal battery the size of a small building. That is nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, "Hotter than the melting point of steel," he explained.

But what makes his box of white-hot rocks so significant is they were not heated by burning tons of coal or gas, but by catching sunlight with the thousands of photovoltaic solar panels that surround his prototype west of Fresno. If successful, Ponec and his start-up Antora Energy could be part of a new, multi-trillion-dollar energy storage sector that simply uses sun or wind to make boxes of rocks hot enough to run the world's biggest factories. "People sometimes feel like they're insulting us by saying, 'Hey, that sounds really simple," Ponec laughed. "And we say, 'No, that's exactly the point'... The problem is you can't shut down your factory when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing, and that's exactly the problem that we focused on."

While the word "battery" most likely evokes the chemical kind found in cars and electronics in 2023, hot rocks currently store ten times as much energy as lithium ion around the world, thanks to an invention from the 1800s known as Cowper stoves. Often found in smelting plants, these massive towers of stacked bricks absorb the wasted heat of a blast furnace until it heats to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and then provides over 100 megawatts of heat energy for about 20 minutes. The process can be repeated 24 times a day for 30 years, and Antora is among the startups experimenting with different kinds of rocks in insulated boxes or molten salt in cylinders to find the most efficient combination...

Antora has managed to raise $80 million in seed money from investors that include Bill Gates, but their main competitor is another Bay Area startup called Rondo that uses abundant refractory brick, which is cheaper than carbon by weight but not as energy dense. Rondo has attracted even more funding than Antora and its first battery is producing commercial power for an ethanol plant in California... Tesla recently predicted a carbon-free world will need an astonishing 240 terawatt-hours of energy storage — more than 340 times the amount of storage built with lithium-ion batteries in 2022. Rondo CEO John O'Donnell predicts more than half of all that new capacity will come in the form of heat batteries, simply because the raw ingredients are so readily available.

By plugging their factories into as many thermal batteries as they need, manufacturers won't have to wait in a years-long line for grid connections and upgrades.
Ponec tells CNN that when it comes to de-carbonizing today, "we have the tools we need. We just need to deploy them.

"The transition is inevitable. It's going to happen. And if you talk behind closed doors to most of the people in the fossil fuel industry, they'll say the same thing."

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of climate hazards at University College London. He also writes on CNN that it's "essential" to laugh in the face of the climate crisis: If you don't laugh, you will cry, and that marks the beginning of a very slippery slope. As civilization faces a threat that dwarfs that of every war ever fought combined, and the outcome of the latest climate COP offers little hope, it's something we need — not only to remember — but to actively adopt as a weapon in our armoury to fight for a better future for our children and their children. They say that laughter is the best medicine, but weaponised comedy has the potential to do more than just make us feel good. Not only can it help inform and educate about global heating and the climate breakdown it is driving, but also to encourage and bolster action...

This is why ventures like "Climate Science Translated," which I took part in earlier this year, are so important. The British-based project — brainchild of ethical insurer Nick Oldridge and the climate communications outfit Utopia Bureau — teams climate scientists up with comedians, who 'translate' the science into bite-sized, funny and pretty irreverent chunks that can be understood, digested and appreciated by anyone.
You can see four of the videos on their web site. "Climate science is complicated," each video begins. "So we're translating it into human."

For example, last month Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer on climate science at London's Imperial College, created a new video with comedian Nish Kumar: Dr. Otto: Human-caused climate change is fundamentally changing the fabric of the weather as we know it. It's leading to events which we've simply never seen before.

Comedian Kumar: Translation: Weather used to be clouds. Now we've made it into a sort of Rottweiler on steroids that wants to chew everyone's head off.

Dr. Otto: The continuing increase in global average temperature is already causing higher probabilities of extreme rainfall and flash flooding, as well more intense storms, prolonged droughts, record-breaking heatwaves, and wildfires.

Kumar: Very soon climate scientists are just going to ditch their graphs and point out the window with an expression that says, "I fucking told you!"

Dr. Otto: This is not a problem just for our children and grandchildren. This is an immediate threat to all our lives.

Kumar: I don't know if you're familiar with the film The Terminator, but if someone came from the future to warn us of this threat, they'd have travelled from next Wednesday.
And three weeks ago a follow-up video came from earth systems science professor Mark Maslin from London's University College, teaming up with comedian Jo Brand: Professor Maslin: We are heading for unknown territory if we trigger tipping points — irreversible threshholds which shift our entire ecosystem into a different state.

Comedian Brand: If you liked climate crisis, you're going to love climate complete fucking collapse...

Professor Maslin: The irony is solar and wind power are now over 10 times cheaper than oil and gas. We can still prevent much of the damage, and end up in a better place for everyone.

Brand: With wind and sun power, we save money, and don't die. It's a pretty strong selling point.

Professor Maslin: Most people actually are in favor of urgent action. The reason governments are not transitioning fast enough is because the fossil fuel industry has a grip on many politicians. In fact, governments subsidize them with our taxpayer money — over $1 trillion a year, according to the IMF.

Brand: We are paying a bunch of rich dudes one trillion dollars a year to fuck up our future. I'd do it for that money. When can I start?
Each video ends with the words "All Hands On Deck Now", urging action by voting, contacting your representative, joining a local group, and protesting.

Climate hazard professor Bill McGuire writes on CNN that he hopes to see a growing movement: As Kiri Pritchard-McLean pointedly observes: "If comedians are helping scientists out, you know things aren't going well...." There is even a "Sustainable Stand-up" course aimed at teaching comedy beginners about how climate and social issues can be addressed in their shows, and which has run in 11 countries.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Grunge music: a source of validation for a generation of disaffected youth. And a surprising source of scientific inspiration for Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. While listening to Soundgarden's 1994 hit Black Hole Sun 2 years ago, he contemplated a curious question: Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? A new study by Bellinger and colleagues suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. Astronomers could detect these trapped black holes by the vibrations they cause on the star's surface. And if there's enough of them out there, they could function as the mysterious dark matter that holds the universe together.

The researchers found that the black holes would sink to the star's core where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion to produce heat and light. At first, very little would happen. Even a dense stellar core is mostly empty space. The most microscopic of the black holes would have a hard time finding matter to consume and its growth would be extremely slow, Bellinger says. "It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe to eat the star." But larger ones, roughly as massive as the asteroid Ceres or the dwarf planet Pluto, would get bigger on timescales of only a few hundred million years. Material would spiral onto the black hole, forming a disk that would heat up through friction and emit radiation. Once the black hole was about as massive as Earth, it would produce significant amounts of radiation, shining brightly and churning up the star's core like pot of boiling water. "It will become a black hole -- powered object rather than fusion-powered object," says study co-author Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University. He and his colleagues have dubbed these entities "Hawking stars."

The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has spotted about 500 such anomalously cool giant stars, known as red stragglers, Bellinger says. To figure out whether these might actually be hiding a black hole, he says, astronomers could tune in to the particular frequencies at which the stars vibrate. Because a Hawking star would churn throughout its interior, rather than just in the topmost layers like an ordinary red giant, it would be expected to thrum with a particular combination of frequencies. Such waves can be detected in the way the star's light pulses and throbs. Bellinger is applying for funding to study the known red stragglers and see whether any display the characteristic vibrations of a black hole. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This year has been marked by many terrifying things, but perhaps the most surprising of the 2023 horrors was ... eye drops. The seemingly innocuous teeny squeeze bottle made for alarming headlines numerous times during our current revolution around the sun, with lengthy lists of recalls, startling factory inspections, and ghastly reports of people developing near-untreatable bacterial infections, losing their eyes and vision, and dying.

Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled "What You Should Know about Eye Drops" in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market. The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine.

Meghan Bartels reports via Scientific American: Some sky watchers this month will witness Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and best-known stars in the sky, nearly disappear. Mere seconds later -- despite astronomers' hopes that the star will meet its explosive end someday soon -- it will return, shining just as brightly as ever. Betelgeuse's brief blip of obscurity will mark a cosmic coincidence: an asteroid will block the star from view over a thin strip of Earth's surface. Scientists are hailing this celestial alignment as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion that, they hope, will permit them to glimpse Betelgeuse's ever changing surface of hot and cold patches in the best resolution to date. The opportunity comes courtesy of a sizable asteroid called Leona, which astronomers first spotted in 1891. On its own, Leona is just another space rock cluttering up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But at 8:17 P.M. ET on December 11 Leona will slip directly between Earth and Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star that, unlike the asteroid, has been recognized by countless generations of humans around the world. [...]

To understand how special the event is, consider the total solar eclipse that will occur in April 2024. During the climax of the eclipse, viewers across a narrow strip of Earth's surface will see the moon pass directly in front of the sun. Because the two bodies appear as the same size in our sky, the moon will entirely block the visible disk of the sun and expose the faint, wispy halo called the corona, a layer of our home star's atmosphere that scientists otherwise cannot see from Earth. Similarly, the roughly 40-mile-wide Leona appears in the sky as about the same size as the enormous but very distant Betelgeuse. This will allow the asteroid to block all or most of the star's light when the two bodies perfectly align. But whereas Earth experiences a total solar eclipse every 18 months or so, occultations of bright stars such as Betelgeuse are extremely rare, occurring less than once a century [...].

Back in 2021 Hurricane Ida knocked out power lines in New Orleans, leaving parts of the city in darkness for 10 days.

So a coalition of community-based organizations (including some churches) decided to build "solar-powered disaster response hubs that could transform the city's approach to resilience," reports the Guardian. So far there's seven, but the group "has ambitions to build dozens more." On a bright, balmy autumn morning a couple of weeks ago [61-year-old pastor Antoine] Barriere climbed a long, steep ladder to show me the 460 solar panels that now cover a third or so of his church's flat roof. The solar panels were generating more than enough energy to power Household of Faith, a non-denominational megachurch with 4,000 mostly Black parishioners in New Orleans East. Downstairs, a cabinet was stacked with backup batteries that were fully charged in case of a power outage — a frequent occurrence thanks to the low-lying city's vulnerability to hurricanes, thunderstorms, high winds, extreme heat and flooding. In a worst-case scenario — no sun, thundery dark skies and power outage — the backup batteries could power essential appliances for a couple of days including the water heater, five commercial fridge freezers storing perishables for the weekly food pantry, and air conditioning for the vast main hall which could be converted into a dormitory-style shelter.

But on this brilliant cloudless morning, most of the solar-generated energy was going into the city's electric grid. New Orleans' one-for-one net metering scheme allows the church to offset its excess clean energy against the utility's dirty energy, and this should become a net zero facility within 12 months... The idea is that each community lighthouse should be an institution locals already know and trust — such as a place of worship, health clinic or community centre — that can be converted into a resilience hub where people can converge during a power outage to get cool, recharge phones, have a meal, connect to a medical device or store medication that requires refrigeration such as insulin. In addition, community lighthouses will be able to keep the services running that people rely on such as the food pantry and religious sermons, while also adding capacity to the city's wider emergency-response efforts as a distribution hub, shelter and possibly even house a makeshift clinic.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

The Space Weather Prediction Center is closely watching the arrival of a super-hot plasma eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), that will slam into Earth tonight, writes longtime Slashdot reader StyleChief. Images of the huge sunspot "rotating to face the earth" can be viewed here. The Space Weather Prediction Center reports: With 3 CMEs already inbound, the addition of a 4th, full halo CME has prompted SWPC forecasters to upgrade the G2 Watch on 01 Dec to a G3 Watch. This faster-moving halo CME is progged to merge with 2 of the 3 upstream CMEs, all arriving at Earth on 01 Dec. G3 (Strong) conditions are now likely on 01 Dec. Continue to monitor spaceweather.gov for the latest updates. "The rapid Earth-bound CME left the sun on Nov. 29 during a powerful M9.8-class solar flare eruption," reports Space.com. "But it isn't alone."

"The speedy plasma outburst will merge with several slower upstream CMEs that left the sun a day earlier (Nov. 28), creating a 'Cannibal CME' that will likely trigger a strong geomagnetic storm akin to a Nov. 5 event that supercharged auroras and STEVE around the world."

"Two articles from Electrek and InsideEVs describe Hyundai and Kia's new 'Uni Wheel' drive system that could revolutionize EV design," writes longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe. From a report: Described by its makers as a "paradigm-shifting vehicle drive system," the Uni Wheel moves the main drive system components to the vacant space within an EVs wheel hubs. The approach utilizes a planetary gear configuration consisting of a sun gear in the center, four pinion gears on each side, and a ring gear surrounding everything. Traditional ICE vehicles utilize CV joints, but by moving them closer to the wheels requires a short drive train length and as a result, a decrease in efficiency and durability -- especially over bumpy terrain. Hyundai and Kia's Uni Wheel system on the other hand, can transmit power with almost zero changes to efficiency, regardless of wheel movement. "Advantages include more platform space and more room within an EV's interior," adds Uncle_Meataxe. "When this system may be integrated into an actual EV remains unclear, but Kia and Hyundai have already registered eight patents related to the technology." You can learn more about the new drive system via an instructional video on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Oct. 9, 2022, telescopes in space picked up a jet of high energy photons careening through the cosmos toward Earth, evidence of a supernova exploding 1.9 billion light-years away. Such events are known as gamma ray bursts, and astronomers who have continued studying this one said it was the "brightest of all time." Now, a team of scientists have discovered that this burst caused a measurable change in the number of ionized particles found in Earth's upper atmosphere, including ozone molecules, which readily absorb harmful solar radiation.

"The ozone was partially depleted -- was destroyed temporarily," said Pietro Ubertini, an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome who was involved in discovering the atmospheric event. The effect was detectable for just a few minutes before the ozone repaired itself, so it was "nothing serious," Dr. Ubertini said. But had the supernova occurred closer to us, he said, "it would be a catastrophe." The discovery, reported Tuesday in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates how even explosions that occur far from our solar system can influence the atmosphere, which can be used as a giant detector for extreme cosmic phenomena.

To study the effects of last year's gamma ray burst on Earth, Dr. Ubertini and his colleagues looked for signals at the top of the ionosphere using data from the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite, an orbiter designed to study changes in the atmosphere during earthquakes. They identified a sharp jump in the electric field at the top of the ionosphere, which they correlated to the gamma ray burst signal measured by the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, a mission that launched in 2002 to observe radiation from faraway celestial objects. The researchers found that the electric field rose by a factor of 60 as gamma rays ionized (essentially knocking away electrons from) ozone and nitrogen molecules high in the atmosphere. Once ionized, the molecule is unable to absorb any ultraviolet radiation, temporarily exposing Earth to more of the sun's damaging rays.

Rovers and orbiters will continue collecting limited data during a two-week communications pause due to the position of Earth, the Sun, and the Red Planet. From a report: NASA will hold off sending commands to its Mars fleet for two weeks, from Nov. 11 to 25, while Earth and the Red Planet are on opposite sides of the Sun. Called Mars solar conjunction, this phenomenon happens every two years. The missions pause because hot, ionized gas expelled from the Sun's corona could potentially corrupt radio signals sent from Earth to NASA's Mars spacecraft, leading to unexpected behaviors.

That's not to say those robotic explorers are on holiday. NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers will monitor changes in surface conditions, weather, and radiation as they stay parked. Although momentarily grounded, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will use its color camera to study the movement of sand, which poses an ever-present challenge to Mars missions. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Odyssey orbiter will continue imaging the surface. And MAVEN will continue collecting data on interactions between the atmosphere and the Sun.

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD's remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. From a report: In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD's extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and "functionality updates as available."

For AMD users keeping a close eye on their driver releases, they'll likely recognize that AMD already began this process back in September -- though AMD hasn't officially documented the change until now. As of AMD's September Adrenaline 23.9 driver series, AMD split up the RDNA and GCN driver packages, and with that they have also split the driver branches between the two architectures. As a result, only RDNA cards are receiving new features and updates as part of AMD's mainline driver branch (currently 23.20), while the GCN cards have been parked on a maintenance driver branch - 23.19.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.

"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime. The proposal from Levine may face opposition from vested interests and strong opinions in the international community -- notably, the Russians and the Vatican. "The head of the IBWM (or BIPM in French) said in November 2022 that Russia opposed the dropping of leap seconds because it wanted to wait until 2040," reports Ars Technica. "The nation's satellite positioning system, GLONASS, was built with leap seconds in mind, and reworking the system would seemingly be taxing."

"There's also the Vatican, which has concerned itself with astronomy since at least the Gregorian Calendar, and may also oppose the removal of leap seconds. The Rev. Paul Gabor, astrophysicist and vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona, has been quoted and cited as opposing the deeper separation of human and planetary time. Keeping proper time, Gabor wrote his 2017 book The Science of Time, is 'one of the oldest missions of astronomy.'"

"In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved," Gabor writes.