Showing all posts about science
Artemis II returns safely to Earth despite heat shield concerns
13 April 2026
Splashdown occurred at about ten o’clock in the morning in my part of the world. I had been dreading the fiery re-entry phase of the flight, after a number of commentators expressed doubts as to the integrity of the return vehicle’s heat shield. Thankfully all was well in the end.
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astronomy, science, space exploration
Say nothing to Houston: decades old bug found in Apollo guidance system code
9 April 2026
JUXT, a software consultancy based in the United Kingdom, report discovering a bug in the code of the Apollo Guidance Computer, nearly fifty-four years after the last Apollo Moon flight:
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the most scrutinised codebases in history. Thousands of developers have read it. Academics have published papers on its reliability. Emulators run it instruction by instruction. We found a bug in it that had been missed for fifty-seven years: a resource lock in the gyro control code that leaks on an error path, silently disabling the guidance platform’s ability to realign.
The guidance systems were installed in both the command module, and lunar module (the vessel that landed on the Moon), of the Apollo craft.
Thankfully, the bug didn’t manifest itself during the Apollo missions. There’s enough happening during a flight to the Moon without wanting to worry about patches for software bugs.
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science, space exploration, technology
Forget artificial intelligence, aliens may usurp humanity instead
8 April 2026
When people are in competition, they work harder if the game seems winnable, and decrease effort if they think they’ll lose. It’s implied that because humans are so far behind aliens, we are uncompetitive and so should put in less effort.
There’s — somehow — an idea, published on Marginal Revolution, that technologically advanced extraterrestrials have placed alien drone probes, which evade detection, across the solar system. These devices — if they exist — are apparently keeping an eye on what’s happening on Earth.
I even double checked the date the article was posted: Saturday 4 April 2026. So it wasn’t some sort of April Fool’s caper. On the other hand of course, Artemis II was on the way to the Moon by then.
The question though, what should we do if there are surveillance probes within the solar system? And who knows, maybe aliens are watching us. Maybe extraterrestrials indeed exist — there’s surely at least one intelligent alien civilisation somewhere in the universe — and they’ve found us.
But why they don’t make their presence known puzzles me. All those UAP sightings over the last several decades have somewhat given the show away, have they not? Let’s see you, not your incredible interstellar-space travel capable vessels.
But if we don’t want extraterrestrials to wipe us out, or simply stop us travelling beyond the limits of the solar system — things they may want to do — we need to lift our game. Work harder. Be more ambitious. Even if we remain uncompetitive in comparison. We also all need to work together.
If that’s possible. And if it’s not, I think that’s why they call it the great filter.
What a situation to be in.
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Fears the Artemis II heat shield may not be safe
1 April 2026
On the eve of the launch of NASA‘s Artemis II ten-day Moon flyby mission, Maciej Cegłowski warns that the heat shield of the Orion spacecraft and command module, which the crew will use to return to Earth’s surface, is not safe:
In a nutshell, Camarda argues that NASA is demonstrating the same dysfunction that led to the Columbia and Challenger disasters. Faced with an unexpected engineering failure, it has built toy models to convince itself that the conclusion it wants to reach (it’s safe to fly) are supported by evidence. These toy models are not grounded in physics, but because they appear to be quantitative, they create a false sense of security and understanding, an epistemic fig leaf for management to hide behind.
Cegłowski is not alone, and concerns about the re-entry vessel’s heat shield have been widely flagged in recent weeks. At this late stage in proceedings it can only be hoped NASA’s assurances that the heat shield is safe can be taken at face value.
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astronomy, science, space exploration
No sign of extraterrestrial life? Blame it on bad space weather
18 March 2026
In the search for evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, astronomers, and organisations like SETI, often seek out narrowband radio signals.
Space is full of radio signals, most of them broadband, which usually occur naturally. Neutron stars are but one generator of such signals. Narrowband radio transmissions, on the other hand, are somewhat more likely to be created by an intelligent civilisation. On Earth, for instance, TV transmissions and mobile phones, are among sources of narrowband radio signals.
It makes sense then to look out for such signals in deep space. But some recent research conducted by SETI suggests narrowband radio signals may be disrupted by chaotic flows of ionised gas, and other sources of turbulence in the cosmos:
A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar “space weather” could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect. Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches.
We keep coming up with explanations to account for the apparent absence of intelligent extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe. Now we’re blaming the weather.
The smart money says there is intelligent life somewhere in the cosmos, but it may not be all that common, nor particularly close to us. There’s a lot of space out there, beyond the solar system.
The size of the galaxy, to say nothing of the universe, is something many of us struggle to comprehend. Even if humanity possessed the means to travel at speeds close to the velocity of light, it would take over four years just to reach Proxima Centauri, the star presently closest to the Sun.
To visit the centre of our galaxy, the journey would take over twenty-five thousand years.
That’s not insignificant. In fact, twenty-five thousand light years constitutes a vast amount of space. An alien civilisation could be tucked in there somewhere, but it might take thousands of years for evidence of their presence to become apparent.
On paper, the chances of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life are better than even.
There are potentially millions, if not more, of exoplanets with environments conducive to complex life in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And if intelligent life can take hold on Earth, it can surely take hold elsewhere. But there are those who think intelligent life on Earth is a fluke, and a lot of things had to go the right way, over a period of billions of years, for this to happen.
Bad “weather” in deep space may well be playing a part in concealing the presence of extraterrestrial technological civilisations. But their scarcity, and extreme distance — potentially tens of thousands of light years — from Earth, probably better explains why there is no sign, yet, of anyone else.
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Vision loss in some people is being attributed to their tattoos
19 February 2026
Jacinta Bowler writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):
The condition, known as tattoo-associated uveitis, can lead to permanent vision loss, glaucoma, and patients requiring immunosuppressants for the rest of their life.
While rare, the condition can set in several years after getting a tattoo. In one case, decades had passed before the person began experiencing vision loss.
Most people seeking tattoos doubtless know about the risk of infection, or allergic reactions, but few would expect their vision to be impacted, particularly years after the event.
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Elon Musk says a city-size Moon base could be built in ten years
11 February 2026
Elon Musk, in his capacity as CEO of SpaceX, wants to build a “self-growing” city on the Moon. He thinks the task will take about ten years to complete.
Establishing a permanent base on the Moon seems like a worthwhile goal, but is not without significant challenges, as Aakash Gupta writes:
The unsolved problems are real. Lunar dust is electrostatically charged and sharp as broken glass. It shreds seals, clogs machinery, and embeds in lung tissue. Nobody has a long-duration fix. Radiation on the surface runs 200x Earth’s dose. Regolith shelters and water shielding help but add enormous construction overhead. The 14-day night drops temperatures to -173°C and kills all solar power, and the only flight-ready nuclear reactors produce 1-10 kW, far below what a growing base demands. What years of 1/6 gravity do to human bone density and cardiovascular systems is completely unknown.
I would like to wave away these difficulties by uttering something like “nothing ventured, nothing gained”, but fear I would somewhat be oversimplifying matters.
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current affairs, science, space exploration
Artemis astronauts take smartphones to the Moon, Instagram goes interplanetary (sort of)
7 February 2026
Jared Isaacman, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) administrator, writing on X/Twitter:
NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II. We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.
When it comes to photos from the Artemis flights, expect copious selfies from both deep-space and the Lunar surface.
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photography, science, smartphones, space exploration
Universe to astronomers: I am stranger than you imagine
4 December 2025
Kurzgesagt making sense of a non-sensical universe:
For decades, we’ve had a beautiful theory of the cosmos. One that explained how the universe began, what it’s made of, and how it’s supposed to behave. It matched our observations astonishingly well and made us feel like we’d almost deciphered the cosmic code. But in the last few years, as our telescopes got better and our data sharper, cracks started to appear. Strange mismatches between what the theory predicted and what we actually saw.
British astronomer Arthur Eddington wrote in a book published in 1927, saying: “not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” He was riffing on the words of compatriot scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote, also in 1927: “now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
Stranger. Queerer. Take your pick.
These people nailed the nature of the universe one hundred years ago, with a fraction of the knowledge we have today. And what we know now will likely only represent a mere fraction what we’ll know in another one-hundred years. I think it’s a little too soon to say we’ve figured out the universe.
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Too complicated for algorithms: the universe cannot be a simulation
3 November 2025
The bus I’m on arrives at an interchange stop but a minute late and misses the connecting service which left a minute earlier than scheduled. The bean grinder at the cafe breaks down just as I arrive.
The door phone at a friend’s apartment is on the blink, and I’m in a phone black spot and unable to call them. The internet connection drops mid way through a bank transaction, and refuses to reconnect for several minutes, leaving me wondering whether the payment went through or not.
A micro-tear in my water bottle partly soaks the contents of my day bag. A succession of late-evening (no less) traffic delays sees us reach the supermarket a minute after closing time. My laptop crashes as I open the lid to resume a session. This is what happened one day.
They’re all minor irritations, but were pretty much consecutive. Of course it was a run of bad luck, yet occasions like these are enough to make me think the universe is a simulation, I’m a Sim, and am being cruelly manipulated by player of the game that is the universe we live in.
I need no longer think that though. An international team of researchers, lead by Dr Mir Faizal of Canada’s University of British Columbia, have found the universe is, in essence, too complicated an entity to be the product of a computer generated simulation:
Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we’re not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.
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