An anonymous reader quotes a Bloomberg article, written by Jason Leopold: The aurora borealis, or northern lights, is a colorful display in the night sky that comes from geomagnetic storms in space. When charged particles from the sun smash into the Earth's upper atmosphere, they create bright, kaleidoscopic ribbons of light, typically in polar regions. Really big solar action can interfere with GPS systems and power grids. That's exactly what happened on May 10, when there were three "coronal mass ejections" (my future metal band name) that produced one of the most powerful solar storms in 500 years, hence the dazzling, polychromatic sky visible even from South America. Turns out, the extreme space weather also disrupted life on Earth.

Six days after the northern lights, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with NOAA. I was curious how the agency reacted to the atmospheric event and whether the public deserved to be concerned. I asked NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center and National Weather Service for a wide range of records, including emails, photographs, satellite images and threat assessments. A couple of weeks ago, NOAA turned over some interesting documents. The short version is, while we marveled at the light show, scientists were concerned. According to one internal memo, the geomagnetic storm was an "extreme," rare event and if NOAA scientists hadn't been on their game it could have been catastrophic.

A May 14, three-page after action memo disseminated by Clinton Wallace, the director of the Space Weather Prediction Center, described the storm's impact and explained the celestial phenomenon. He said "Solar Cycle 25," a phase of solar sunspot activity that began in December 2019 and continues through 2030, "has been more active than anticipated, with an intense surge in solar activity marking the beginning of May." "A large group of unstable sunspots on the Sun's surface unleashed several powerful solar flares, immediately affecting the Earth's outer atmosphere and causing disruptions in high-frequency (HF) radio communications," he wrote. "This had significant implications for trans-oceanic aviation, which relies heavily on HF radio for communication over long distances."

On May 9, a day before the northern lights extravaganza, staff at the Space Weather Prediction Center "activated" the North American Electric Reliability Corp. hotline to make sure the regulator was prepared. Wallace's memo said NERC gave about 3,000 electric utility companies a six-hour head start to get ready. The space weather officials also advised the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on preparedness. Wallace wrote in his memo that the storm caused "significant disruptions across multiple sectors, including navigation, power grids, aviation, and satellite operations." He also noted that the severity of the geomagnetic storm "underscored the interconnectedness and vulnerability of modern infrastructure to space weather." Although Wallace said the space weather scientists took steps to mitigate any potential disaster, their work "highlighted areas for improvement in preparedness and response." He didn't elaborate.

Scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery about the geologic process behind these large pieces of gold found in quartz rock. From a report: Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn't too tricky: Much of the world's gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth's squashed-up crust. But the geologic process that put gold nuggets there in the first place was a mystery. Now, a new study published today in Nature Geoscience has come up with a convincing, and surprising, answer: electricity, and earthquakes -- lots of them.

Those nuggets owe their existence to the strange electrical properties of common quartz. When squished or jiggled, the mineral generates electricity. That drags gold particles out of fluid in Earth's crust. The particles crystallize out as grains of gold -- and, over time, with enough electrical stimulation, those grains bloom into nuggets. "If you shake quartz, it makes electricity. If you make electricity, gold comes out," says Christopher Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and the lead author of the new paper. Earthquakes are the most likely natural source of that shaking, and the team's lab experiments show that earthquakes can make gold nuggets.

The idea that gold nuggets appear because of electricity instead of a more conventional geologic process is, at first, a peculiar thought. But "it makes complete sense," says Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in England and who was not involved with the new work. Quartz veins host a disproportionate number of gold nuggets and their environments experience plenty of earthquakes.

schwit1 shares a report: If you are reading this and live in America, or used to live in America, or maybe just went to America one time many years ago, then you are almost certainly performing unpaid labor for the U.S. government and have been for years. How? By storing some of the billions of pennies the U.S. Mint makes every year that virtually no one uses.

Why are we still making tons (many thousands of tons) of pennies if no one uses them? That's a sensible question with a psychotic answer: We have to keep making all these pennies -- over $45 million worth last year -- because no one uses them. In fact, it could be very bad if we did.

When you insert a quarter into a soda machine, that quarter eventually finds its way back to a bank, from which it can be redistributed to a store's cash register and handed out as change -- maybe even to you, who can put it into a soda machine again and start the whole process over. That's beautiful. (Please be mindful of your soft drink consumption.)

But few of us ever spend pennies. We mostly just store them. The 1-cent coins are wherever you've left them: a glass jar, a winter purse, a RAV4 cup holder, a five-gallon water cooler dispenser, the couch. Many of them are simply on the ground. But take it from me, a former cashier: Cashiers don't have time to scrounge on the sidewalk every time they need to make change. That is where the Mint comes in. Every year it makes a few billion more pennies to replace the ones everyone is thoughtlessly, indefinitely storing and scatters them like kudzu seeds across the nation.

You -- a scientist of some kind, possibly -- might think an obvious solution now presents itself: Why not encourage people to use the pennies they have lying around instead of manufacturing new ones every year? We can't! Or, anyway, we'd better not. According to a Mint report, if even a modest share of our neglected pennies suddenly returned to circulation, the result would be a "logistically unmanageable" dilemma for Earth's wealthiest nation. As in, the penny tsunami could overwhelm government vaults.

That's not great, but at the end of the day we're talking only about pennies. How much could a penny cost to make? A penny? If only we lived in such a paradise. Unfortunately, one penny costs more than three pennies (3.07 cents at last count) to make and distribute! When I learned this, I lost my mind.

Though the ocean covers about 70% of earth, we humans have only mapped a quarter of its floor to a high resolution, reports CNN. Many of the world's highest mountains aren't visible on land — they rise up thousands of meters from the seafloor. An expedition to the Nazca Ridge, 900 miles off the coast of Chile, has mapped and explored a newly discovered seamount four times taller than the world's tallest building. What's more, the underwater mountain's peaks, crags and ridges are home to coral gardens that host rare deep-dwelling octopuses, squids and creatures known as flying spaghetti monsters, some of which hadn't been well documented before this research.
The undersea mountain is 1.9 miles (3,109 meters) tall, according to another article, which notes that the researchers also used a sonar system to bounce waves to the ocean floor, timing how long they took to reach the surface: The researchers documented a ghostly white Casper octopus, marking the first time this deep-dwelling cephalopod has been seen in the southern Pacific. They also spotted two rare Bathyphysa siphonophores, sometimes known as flying spaghetti monsters for their stringlike appearance. "The (Casper) octopus has never been captured, so it doesn't actually have a scientific name yet," Virmani said. The team also recorded the first footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid, known only from a few collected specimens.

Scientists have finally detected and measured the ambipolar field, a weak electric field surrounding Earth that was first theorized over 60 years ago. "Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field," says astronomer Glyn Collinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time." ScienceAlert reports: Here's how the ambipolar field was expected to work. Starting at an altitude of around 250 kilometers (155 miles), in a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere, extreme ultraviolet and solar radiation ionizes atmospheric atoms, breaking off negatively charged electrons and turning the atom into a positively charged ion. The lighter electrons will try to fly off into space, while the heavier ions will try to sink towards the ground. But the plasma environment will try to maintain charge neutrality, which results in the emergence of an electric field between the electrons and the ions to tether them together. This is called the ambipolar field because it works in both directions, with the ions supplying a downward pull and the electrons an upward one. The result is that the atmosphere is puffed up; the increased altitude allows some ions to escape into space, which is what we see in the polar wind.

This ambipolar field would be incredibly weak, which is why Collinson and his team designed instrumentation to detect it. The Endurance mission, carrying this experiment, was launched in May 2022, reaching an altitude of 768.03 kilometers (477.23 miles) before falling back to Earth with its precious, hard-won data. And it succeeded. It measured a change in electric potential of just 0.55 volts -- but that was all that was needed. "A half a volt is almost nothing -- it's only about as strong as a watch battery," Collinson says. "But that's just the right amount to explain the polar wind." That amount of charge is enough to tug on hydrogen ions with 10.6 times the strength of gravity, launching them into space at the supersonic speeds measured over Earth's poles. Oxygen ions, which are heavier than hydrogen ions, are also lofted higher, increasing the density of the ionosphere at high altitudes by 271 percent, compared to what its density would be without the ambipolar field. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Stephen Whiting called for greater transparency from China regarding space debris this week, citing concerns over the recent breakup of a Long March 6A rocket's upper stage. The incident, which occurred after an August 6 satellite launch, scattered over 300 pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit.

While acknowledging some improvement in U.S.-China military dialogue, Whiting stressed on the need for proactive communication about space junk, ArsTechnica reports. "I hope the next time there's a rocket like that, that leaves a lot of debris, that it's not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we're getting communications to help us understand that," he said.

Astronomy researchers are urging the FCC to reconsider exempting large constellations of low Earth satellites from environmental reviews due to growing concerns over pollution, safety risks, and the impact on stargazing. They argue that the decades-old exemption is outdated, given the massive increase in satellite launches and potential long-term effects on the ozone, climate, and environment. The Register reports: Astronomers from Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Arizona, among others, have added their names to a public letter that will be presented at some point to FCC space bureau chief Julie Kearney. The letter asks the FCC to follow prior recommendations from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which in 2022 issued a report calling for the telecom regulator to revisit its decision to exempt large constellations of satellites from environmental review.

The exemption was created way back in 1986, when far fewer satellites were being launched. The GAO, however, urged the FCC to review the exemption, citing the recent proliferation of satellites and the questions that have been raised about the sustainability of the exemption. That recommendation was recently echoed by US PIRG, which earlier this month made a similar request to the FCC. US PIRG notes that the number of satellites in low Earth orbit has increased by a factor of 127 over the past five years, driven largely by the deployment of mega-constellations of communications satellites from SpaceX's Starlink subsidiary.

This weekend NASA said they'd turn to SpaceX to return two astronauts from the International Space Station, notes the Associated Press, "rather than risk using the Boeing Starliner capsule that delivered them." (They add that Boeing's capsule "has been plagued by problems with its propulsion system.")

But Reuters reported that even before the setback, Boeing and Lockheed Martin were "in talks to sell their rocket-launching joint venture United Launch Alliance to Sierra Space, two people familiar with the discussions said." A deal to sell ULA, a major provider of launch services to the U.S. government and a top rival to Elon Musk's SpaceX, would mark a significant shift in the U.S. space launch industry as ULA separates from two of the largest defense contractors to a smaller, privately held firm.

The potential sale comes after years of speculation about ULA's future and failed attempts to divest the joint venture over the past decade. In 2019, Boeing and Lockheed Martin reportedly explored selling ULA but couldn't agree on terms with potential buyers... Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Cerberus Capital Management had placed bids in early 2023 for the company, according to people familiar with the negotiations. Rocket Lab had also expressed interest, two people said. None of those discussions led to a deal...

A potential deal could accelerate deployment of [Sierra Space's] crewed spaceflight business, analysts said. A ULA acquisition, they said, would give the company in-house access to launch vehicles that could send its spaceplane and space-station components into Earth's orbit, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars for those launches as a customer...

ULA has faced challenges in scaling Vulcan production and upping its launch rate to meet commercial demand and fulfill contract obligations with the Space Force, which in 2021 picked Vulcan for a sizable chunk of national security missions alongside SpaceX's Falcon fleet. A sale of ULA would unshackle the company from Boeing and Lockheed, whose boards have long resisted ideas from ULA to expand the business beyond rockets and into new competitive markets such as lunar habitats or maneuverable spacecraft, according to former executives.
While Reuters's sources say the negotiations could still end without a deal, they also said ULA could be valued between $2 billion and $3 billion, giving Boeing some cash while shifting its focus to its core businesses of aerospace and defense.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

America's Department of Energy has three R&D labs, according to Wikipedia, one of which is Sandia National Labs. And that New Mexico-based lab has just announced that "A milestone in quantum sensing is drawing closer, promising exquisitely accurate, GPS-free navigation." with research into "a motion sensor so precise it could minimize the nation's reliance on global positioning satellites." Until recently, such a sensor — a thousand times more sensitive than today's navigation-grade devices — would have filled a moving truck. But advancements are dramatically shrinking the size and cost of this technology. For the first time, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have used silicon photonic microchip components to perform a quantum sensing technique called atom interferometry, an ultra-precise way of measuring acceleration. It is the latest milestone toward developing a kind of quantum compass for navigation when GPS signals are unavailable. The team published its findings and introduced a new high-performance silicon photonic modulator — a device that controls light on a microchip — as the cover story in the journal Science Advances... The new modulator is the centerpiece of a laser system on a microchip. Rugged enough to handle heavy vibrations, it would replace a conventional laser system typically the size of a refrigerator...

Besides size, cost has been a major obstacle to deploying quantum navigation devices. Every atom interferometer needs a laser system, and laser systems need modulators. "Just one full-size single-sideband modulator, a commercially available one, is more than $10,000," said Sandia scientist Jongmin Lee. Miniaturizing bulky, expensive components into silicon photonic chips helps drive down these costs. "We can make hundreds of modulators on a single 8-inch wafer and even more on a 12-inch wafer," Kodigala said. And since they can be manufactured using the same process as virtually all computer chips, "This sophisticated four-channel component, including additional custom features, can be mass-produced at a much lower cost compared to today's commercial alternatives, enabling the production of quantum inertial measurement units at a reduced cost," Lee said.

As the technology gets closer to field deployment, the team is exploring other uses beyond navigation. Researchers are investigating whether it could help locate underground cavities and resources by detecting the tiny changes these make to Earth's gravitational force. They also see potential for the optical components they invented, including the modulator, in LIDAR, quantum computing, and optical communications.
Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

A long-time Slashdot reader writes: Recent reports have indicated a near-complete collapse in the population of Snow Crabs in the Bering Sea. Scientists with the US Government's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that warming in the environment has led to vast numbers of snow crabs starving to death.

There has been a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of argument on whether or how much humanity has had an effect on the fundamental ecology of our planet... Here is a fine example of anthropogenic change to the planet's weather, ecosystems and even the planet's very ability to feed us.
From the government's findings on the NOAA web site: "What is particularly noteworthy is these boreal conditions associated with the snow crab collapse are more than 200 times likely to occur in the present climate (1.0 degrees -1.5 degrees of warming rate) than in the preindustrial era," said Mike Litzow, lead author and director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center's Kodiak Lab. "Even more concerning is that Arctic conditions conducive for snow crabs to retain their dominant role in the southeastern Bering Sea are expected to continue to decline in the future." [...] Litzow and his team expect to see Arctic conditions in only 8 percent of future years in the southeastern Bering Sea.
The warmer temperatures brought existential threats including including a fatal disease and more crab-eating predators, their study found. CNN reports that the crabs' "horrific demise appears to be just one impact of the massive transition unfolding in the region, scientists reported... Parts of the Bering Sea are literally becoming less Arctic." Billions of crabs ultimately starved to death, devastating Alaska's fishing industry in the years that followed... The decline of the Alaskan snow crab signals a wider ecosystem change in the Arctic, as oceans warm and sea ice disappears. The ocean around Alaska is now becoming inhospitable for several marine species, including red king crab and sea lions, experts say...

The Arctic region has warmed four times faster than the rest of the planet, scientists have reported. Litzow called what's happening in the Bering Sea a "bellwether" of what's to come. "All of us need to recognize the impacts of climate change," he said.

One of Slashdot's most-visited stories of all time was the 2016 story asking: Can Cow Backpacks Reduce Global Methane Emissions? "Enteric fermentation," or livestock's digestive process, accounts for 22 percent of all U.S. methane emissions, and the manure they produce makes up eight percent more, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency... Methane, like carbon, is a greenhouse gas, but methane's global warming impact per molecule is 25 times greater than carbon's, according to the EPA.
Cow methane still "heats the Earth more than every flight across the world combined," the Washington Post added today, reporting on a new $30 million genetic engineering experiment undertaken by the Innovative Genomics Institute and the University of California at Davis.

Its mission: to transform a cow's gut so it no longer releases methane. Using tools that snip and transfer DNA, researchers plan to genetically engineer microbes in the cow stomach to eliminate those emissions. If they succeed, they could wipe out the world's largest human-made source of methane and help change the trajectory of planetary warming... The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization...

Scientists envision a kind of probiotic pill, given to the cow at birth, that can transform its microbiome permanently...

The current project doesn't target only a particular cow species — it takes aim at the microbiome itself, offering a solution that could apply to all of them. Brad Ringeisen, executive director at the genomics institute, cut his teeth running biotechnology at the U.S. defense research agency DARPA, which helped pioneer transformative innovations including the internet, miniaturized GPS, stealth aircraft and the computer mouse. "I'm taking the DARPA mentality here," he said. "Let's solve it for all cows, not just a fraction of the cows." ...]

"There's no reason a cow has to produce methane," Ringeisen said. So what if scientists could just ... turn it off?
"I personally think this is the one that can make the biggest impact in the world," Ringeisen said. "Say you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all those emissions."

The article says that currently the scientists are feeding red-seaweed oil to a cow to measure the changes, to prepare for their final goal: "replicate those changes with gene editing." (They're using machine learning to reassemble the hundreds of pieces of each miccroorganism's DNA, so they can understand which changes they need to make with their early-intervention probiotic.) Such a probiotic could also improve a farm's productivity. Cows can lose up to 12 percent of their energy through burping up methane; other ruminants, like sheep and goats, also lose energy in this way. "If there is a way to redirect that hydrogen and convert it into milk, meat, wool — it would be much more accepted by farmers," said Ermias Kebreab [a professor of animal science at UC-Davis].

Early treatments will be tested on the cows at Davis, with researchers tracking their burps to evaluate the drop-off in methane emissions. There is still a long way to go. While scientists have proved that they can gene-edit microbes, researchers have so far only shown that they can edit a small fraction of the microbes in the cow gut — or the human gut, for that matter. Institute researchers are developing microbial gene-editing tools, even as they are mapping the species of the microbiome. They are building the plane while flying it.

The teams have received enough funding for seven years of research. The project started last year, and they hope to have a trial treatment ready for testing in cows in the next two years.

Boeing "will return its Starliner capsule from the International Space Station without the NASA astronauts," reports CNBC. Though they've been on the space station since early June, the plan is to have them stay "for about six more months before flying home in February on SpaceX's Crew-9 vehicle.

"The test flight was originally intended to last about nine days." The decision to bring Starliner back from the ISS empty marks a dramatic about-face for NASA and Boeing, as the organizations were previously adamant that the capsule was the primary choice for returning the crew. But Starliner's crew flight test, which had been seen as the final major milestone in the spacecraft's development, faced problems — most notably with its propulsion system.

"Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference with top NASA officials at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday. "We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS."

He reiterated that test flights are "neither safe, nor routine," and that the decision was the "result of a commitment to safety." NASA will now conduct another phase of its Flight Readiness Review to determine when to bring the empty Starliner home. Boeing officials had been adamant in press briefings that Starliner was safe for the astronauts to fly home in the event of an emergency, despite delaying the return multiple times. NASA said there was a "technical disagreement" between the agency and the aerospace company, and said it evaluated risk differently than Boeing for returning its crew.

Nonetheless, NASA officials repeatedly expressed support for Boeing, and Nelson said he was "100% certain" that Starliner would be able to launch with a crew again someday.
NASA posted on X.com that they'd reached the decision "after extensive review by experts across the agency.

And CNBC adds that "Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator, said NASA officials were unanimous in their decision to choose SpaceX to bring the crew home."

NASA's 2022 DART mission "successfully demonstrated how a fast-moving spacecraft could change an asteroid's trajectory by crashing into it," remembers Gizmodo, "potentially providing a way to defend Earth — though the asteroid in this test was never a real threat."

But a followup study suggests debris from that 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid "could actually strike back," they add, "though we're not in any danger." The [DART] team posits that the collision produced a field of rocky ejecta that could reach Earth within 10 years... [Various aerospace scientists] studied data collected by the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LICIACube, which observed DART's impact of Dimorphos up close. Then, they fed LICIACube's data into supercomputers at NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility to simulate how the debris from the asteroid — basically dust and rock — may have disseminated into space. The simulations tracked about 3 million particles kicked up by the impact, some of which are large enough to produce meteors that could be spotted on Earth. Particles from the impact could get to Mars in seven to 13 years, and the fastest particles could make it to our own world in just seven years.

"This detailed data will aid in the identification of DART-created meteors, enabling researchers to accurately analyze and interpret impact-related phenomena," the team wrote in the paper.
"However, these faster particles are expected to be too small to produce visible meteors, based on early observations," said Dr. Eloy Peña-Asensio, who lead the research team, in an interview with Universe Today. (He's a Research Fellow with the Deep-space Astrodynamics Research and Technology group at Milan's Polytechnic Institute.) The team's simulations indicated it could take up to 30 years before any of the ejecta is observed on Earth, in a new (and human-created) meteor shower called the Dimorphids.

So while they won't pose any risk, "If these ejected Dimorphos fragments reach Earth... their small size and high speed will cause them to disintegrate in the atmosphere, creating a beautiful luminous streak in the sky."

Over the next 50 years, people will push further into wildlife habitats across more than half the land on Earth, scientists have found, threatening biodiversity and increasing the chance of future pandemics. From a report: Humans have already transformed or occupied between 70% and 75% of the world's land. Research published in Science Advances on Wednesday found the overlap between human and wildlife populations is expected to increase across 57% of the Earth's land by 2070, driven by human population growth.

[...] As humans and animals share increasingly crowded landscapes, the bigger overlap could result in higher potential for disease transmission, biodiversity loss, animals being killed by people and wildlife eating livestock and crops, the researchers said. Biodiversity loss is the leading driver of infectious disease outbreaks. About 75% of emerging diseases in humans are zoonotic, meaning they can be passed from animals to humans, and many diseases concerning global health authorities -- including Covid-19, mpox, avian flu and swine flu -- likely originated in wildlife.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are facing challenges returning to Earth due to compatibility issues between their Boeing-designed spacesuits and SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. Inc. Magazine reports: The space suits in question are the "intra-vehicular activity" outfits now worn by astronauts. They're simpler than the bulky extra-vehicular space suits used on space walks, and are designed to keep astronauts safe in the capsule in the very unlikely case there's a problem that causes the capsule's atmosphere to be lost. The problem is simple: Should Butch and Suni need to fly back aboard SpaceX's vehicle, their suits won't fit in Dragon's seats. [...]

Boeing and SpaceX suits evolved under totally different design sensibilities. If Boeing and NASA deem Starliner unsafe for humans to fly home in, Butch and Suni must head earthward aboard a SpaceX Dragon, but their suits won't be able to plug into Dragon's systems. Like trying to plug an essentially outdated USB A socket into an iPhone's charge port, the suit connectors have different shapes, styles, and functions. The suits themselves have different systems that integrate with their own capsules for purposes like air leak checks during pre-flight testing.

So if an emergency situation presents itself and astronauts have to come back to Earth before proper plans are finalized, Butch and Suni will have to return inside the cargo section of a Dragon space capsule "unsuited," according to NASA leadership who spoke on the matter in a press conference last week. Other plans include flying up suitable Dragon-connecting space suits for the two astronauts on a later mission, should Starliner be deemed incapable of bringing them back.

Indian influencers It's the largest country on earth — home to 1.4 billion people. But "The Indian government has plans to classify social media creators as 'digital news broadcasters,'" according to the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org.

While there's "no clarity" on the government's next move, the proposed legislation would require social media creators "to register with the government, set up a content evaluation committee that checks all content before it is published, and appoint complaint handlers — all at their own expense. Any failures in compliance could lead to criminal charges, including jail term." On July 26, the Hindustan Times reported that the government plans to tweak the proposed Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, which aims to combine all regulations for broadcasters under one law. As per a new version of the bill, which has been reviewed by Rest of World, the government defines "digital news broadcaster" as "any person who broadcasts news and current affairs programs through an online paper, news portal, website, social media intermediary, or other similar medium as part of a systematic business, professional or commercial activity."

Creators and digital rights activists believe the potential legislation will tighten the government's grip over online content and threaten the last bastion of press freedom for independent journalists in the country. Over 785 Indian creators have sent a letter to the government seeking more transparency in the process of drafting the bill. Creators have also stormed social media with hashtags like #KillTheBill, and made videos to educate their followers about the proposal.
One YouTube creator told the site that if the government requires them to appoint a "grievance redressal officer," they might simply film themselves, responding to grievances — to "make content out of it".

Ars Technica's John Timmer reports: [T]he International Astronomical Union has a resolution that calls for a "Lunar Celestial Reference System" and "Lunar Coordinate Time" to handle things there. On Monday, two researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology, Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, did the math to show how this might work. [...] Ashby and Patla worked on developing a system where anything can be calculated in reference to the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system. Or, as they put it in the paper, their mathematical system "enables us to compare clock rates on the Moon and cislunar Lagrange points with respect to clocks on Earth by using a metric appropriate for a locally freely falling frame such as the center of mass of the Earth-Moon system in the Sun's gravitational field." What does this look like? Well, a lot of deriving equations. The paper's body has 55 of them, and there are another 67 in the appendices. So, a lot of the paper ends up looking like this.

Things get complicated because there are so many factors to consider. There are tidal effects from the Sun and other planets. Anything on the surface of the Earth or Moon is moving due to rotation; other objects are moving while in orbit. The gravitational influence on time will depend on where an object is located. So, there's a lot to keep track of. Ashby and Patla don't have to take everything into account in all circumstances. Some of these factors are so small they'll only be detectable with an extremely high-precision clock. Others tend to cancel each other out. Still, using their system, they're able to calculate that an object near the surface of the Moon will pick up an extra 56 microseconds every day, which is a problem in situations where we may be relying on measuring time with nanosecond precision. And the researchers say that their approach, while focused on the Earth/Moon system, is still generalizable. Which means that it should be possible to modify it and create a frame of reference that would work on both Earth and anywhere else in the Solar System. Which, given the pace at which we've sent things beyond low-Earth orbit, is probably a healthy amount of future-proofing. The findings have been published in the Astronomical Journal. A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) press release announcing the work can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SpaceX will fly the first-ever human spaceflight over the Earth's poles, possibly before the end of this year, the company announced Monday. The private Crew Dragon mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years. The "Fram2" mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX's launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three-to-five day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

The four-person crew will fly, fittingly, aboard Crew Dragon Endurance, which is named after Ernest Shackleton's famous ship that was trapped in the Antarctic ice and eventually sunk there about a century ago. The spacecraft will be fitted with a cupola for both photography and filming. This will be SpaceX's third free-flying mission aboard Crew Dragon, following the Inspiration4 mission funded and commanded by US entrepreneur Jared Isaacman in 2021, and his forthcoming Polaris Dawn mission which may launch later this month. In an interview, Wang said he modeled the Fram2 mission's crew and public outreach programs on the template established by Isaacman.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: For years, astronomers thought it was the Milky Way's destiny to collide with its near neighbor the Andromeda galaxy a few billion years from now. But a new simulation finds a 50% chance the impending crunch will end up a near-miss, at least for the next 10 billion years. It's been known that Andromeda is heading toward our home Galaxy since 1912, heading pretty much straight at the Milky Way at a speed of 110 kilometers per second. Such galaxy mergers, which can be seen in progress elsewhere in the universe, are spectacularly messy affairs. Although most stars survive unscathed, the galaxies' spiral structures are obliterated, sending streams of stars spinning off into space. After billions of years, the merged galaxies typically settle into a single elliptical galaxy: a giant featureless blob of stars. A study from 2008 suggested a Milky Way-Andromeda merger was inevitable within the next 5 billion years, and that in the process the Sun and Earth would get gravitationally grabbed by Andromeda for a time before ending up in the distant outer suburbs of the resulting elliptical, which the researchers dub "Milkomeda."

In the new simulation, researchers made use of the most recent and best estimates of the motion and mass of the four largest galaxies in the Local Group. They then plugged those into simulations developed by the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University. First, they ran the simulation including just the Milky Way and Andromeda and found that they merged in slightly less than half of the cases -- lower odds than other recent estimates. When they included the effect of the Triangulum galaxy, the Local Group's third largest, the merger probability increased to about two-thirds. But with the inclusion of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that is the fourth largest in the Local Group, those chances dropped back down to a coin flip. And if the cosmic smashup does happen, it won't be for about 8 billion years. "As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our Galaxy appear greatly exaggerated," the researchers write. Meanwhile, if the accelerating expansion of the universe continues unabated, all other galaxies will disappear beyond our cosmic event horizon, leaving Milkomeda as the sole occupant of the visible universe. The study is available as a preprint on arXiv.

"AT&T has been told to stop running ads that claim the carrier is already offering cellular coverage from space," reports Ars Technica: AT&T intends to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) and has a deal with AST SpaceMobile, a Starlink competitor that plans a smartphone service from low-Earth-orbit satellites. But AST SpaceMobile's first batch of five satellites isn't scheduled to launch until September.

T-Mobile was annoyed by AT&T running an ad indicating that its satellite-to-cellular service was already available, and filed a challenge with the advertising industry's self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. The BBB National Advertising Division (NAD) ruled against AT&T last month and the carrier appealed to the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), which has now also ruled against AT&T...

AT&T, which is also famous for renaming its 4G service "5GE," reluctantly agreed to comply with the recommendation and released a new version of the satellite-calling commercial with more specific disclaimers.
The 30-second ad — titled "Epic Bad Golf Day" — featured Ben Stiller golfing chasing a badly-hit golf ball all the way into the desert (accompanied by the Pixies' song "Where is My Mind").

But according to the article, T-Mobile filed an official complaint with the advertising review board that "the use of humor does not shield an advertiser from its obligation to ensure that claims are truthful and non-misleading." The ad originally included small text that described the depicted satellite call as a "demonstration of evolving technology." The text was changed this week to say that "satellite calling is not currently available...."

The original version also had text that said, "the future of help is an AT&T satellite call away." The NARB concluded that this "statement can be interpreted reasonably as stating that 'future' technology has now arrived... In the updated version of the ad, AT&T changed the text to say that "the future of help will be an AT&T satellite call away."