ope...a life / di.nota.1
Daphnis is a small moon at 5 miles (8 kilometers) across, but its gravity is powerful enough to disrupt the tiny particles of the A ring that form the Keeler gap's edge. As the moon moves through the Keeler gap, wave-like features are created in both the horizontal and vertical plane.
Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn
Until recently, the “moon king” title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.
Divers caught in sperm whale's giant underwater poo cloud
When Keri Wilk dived into clear waters off the island of Dominica, swimming through a massive whale poo was not in the plan. But it's what happened.
"At first, it seemed like a regular bowel movement," Keri explained.
"But rather than continuing its dive down, it remained at the surface and continued to defecate for a startling length of time.
The "poonado" then spread through the water - ending up in Keri's mouth - as the whale flapped its tail.
Apparently, Crows Love Luxurious Ant Baths.
Photographer Tony Austin knew he had gotten lucky when a murder of crows landed near him on a recent nature walk. But then one of the birds started acting strangely. Austin started shooting — and he was astounded later, when he enlarged his photos: The crow had large black ants all over its body.
A leading theory is that it's all about cleanliness.
"Ants have defensive secretions, chemical weapons they use to fight off other insects and fungi, so if you smear what they've got all over your feathers, you're stealing their fungicides, miticides, insecticides and biocides," as Robert Krulwich reported for NPR.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft acquired its highest resolution images of Jupiter's moon Io on 3 July 1999 during its closest pass to Io since orbit insertion in late 1995. This color mosaic uses the near-infrared, green and violet filters (slightly more than the visible range) of the spacecraft's camera and approximates what the human eye would see. Most of Io's surface has pastel colors, punctuated by black, brown, green, orange, and red units near the active volcanic centers. A false color version of the mosaic has been created to enhance the contrast of the color variations.
NASA’s Webb Scores Another Ringed World With New Image of Uranus
The new image features dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere. The Webb data demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity for the faintest dusty rings, which have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics. The seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus is unique: It rotates on its side, at roughly a 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This causes extreme seasons since the planet’s poles experience many years of constant sunlight followed by an equal number of years of complete darkness. (Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun.)
I will concede that AI has made tremendous progress in these two critical areas: A) pretending to know what it’s talking about. B) stealing from artists.
BY THE WAY, it’s very on-brand for Earth 2023 that our robots are designed to sound plausible rather than be correct. Remember in Star Wars how C-3PO delivered a precise survival probability of flying into an asteroid field? (3720 to 1.) And Han Solo was like, “Shut up, C-3PO,” because he was too cool and handsome to be bothered by math. OR SO WE THOUGHT, because that was the kind of AI we were imagining in the 1980s: AI that was, before anything else, correct.
ChatBots are good at figuring out what comes next when you start a sentence with, “The capitol of Antigua is…” That’s pretty cool. We didn’t have that before. But it’s not intelligence. It’s almost the opposite of intelligence, like the difference between the kid in high school who was always studying and that guy who never studied but could talk and is now a real estate agent. Both can sound smart but only one knows what he’s talking about.
A star has been destroyed by a wandering supermassive black hole
Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn't figure out what it was looking at. Now, about a year later, we know it's the first tidal disruption event—meaning a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole—identified at visual wavelengths. It's also a rather unusual one, in that the supermassive black hole in question does not reside at the center of its galaxy. Instead, there's an even more massive object there, which is feeding on matter at the same time.
All of the observations indicated that AT2024tvd is a tidal disruption event. For example, it maintained a high temperature throughout the observations, unlike a supernova, which tends to cool down over time. There were also fewer high-energy X-rays than one would expect from a supernova. The UV spectrum also looked like previously identified tidal disruption events, with the signature of elements like carbon and nitrogen that don't require a supernova to be produced. That makes this the fourth tidal disruption event we've identified that's the product of a supermassive black hole not located at the center of the galaxy. It's also the first that was initially identified at visible wavelengths.
The year was 1999. Jesse "the mind" Ventura was running Minnesota. and Real Player was Corporate America's streaming tech of choice.
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider
Near-miss collisions between high-energy lead nuclei at the LHC generate intense electromagnetic fields that can knock out protons and transform lead into fleeting quantities of gold nuclei
CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.