Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Sovereignty]

Zeptoseconds: New world record in short time measurement

 

[danielravennest]

Osiris-Rex mission grabbing a piece of ass-teroid (live when posted)

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The probe is on its final descent! This is super-interesting!

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

DONE!!! Landed, sample taken, and liftoff!

 

[Govi]

The next major step is to find out how much of Bennu-stuff that Osiris-REx grabbed. If it's too little (less than 60 grams iirc) they'll do a second grab at a new location in January. If it's enough, they'll get ready to return the sample to Earth. (For this sci-fi-fangirl of many many years, that last was an amazing sentence to be able to write about reality.)

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[danielravennest]

Most explosive blow job I've ever seen.

Yes, I'm making sexual jokes. From the asteroid's point of view, it was just violated by an alien probe.

It's hard to grab something when there's no gravity to hold you in place. So what the round sampling head does is blow nitrogen from a tank inward from the rim, in an attempt to blow rocks loose, and have some of them end up trapped in the collection area. Lots of rocks flying around is promising (and dangerous), so I hope they got what they needed.

I've done some work over the years on asteroid mining, and getting a sample like this is a big step towards making it happen someday. So I'm very excited about this.

The next major step is to find out how much of Bennu-stuff that Osiris-REx grabbed. If it's too little (less than 60 grams iirc) they'll do a second grab at a new location in January. If it's enough, they'll get ready to return the sample to Earth. (For this sci-fi-fangirl of many many years, that last was an amazing sentence to be able to write about reality.)

You know how when an ice skater pulls their arms in, they spin faster? That's similar to how they will measure the sample mass. They spun the spacecraft earlier with no sample, then moved the robot arm, and timed how much the spin changed. Now they will repeat it with whatever they picked up, and see how much difference there is. A heavier arm with the sample will affect the spin more.

The spin *rate* is simply measured by taking timed pictures of the stars and the nearby asteroid. You can very accurately measure how long one rotation takes that way, since computer clocks are very accurate, and camera pixels are very small angles.

 

[Essence Lumin]

The probe is on its final descent! This is super-interesting!

Didn't Cartman say that?

 

[Sovereignty]

 

[Free]

The secret of how the Venus flytrap “remembers” when it captures prey

Scientists genetically altered a Venus flytrap so that it glows green when stimulated.

arstechnica.com

Scientists are continuing to tease out the mechanisms by which the Venus flytrap can tell when it has captured a tasty insect as prey as opposed to an inedible object (or just a false alarm). There is evidence that the carnivorous plant has something akin to a short-term "memory," and a team of Japanese scientists has found evidence that the mechanism for this memory lies in changes in calcium concentrations in its leaves, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Plants.

[...]

Back in 2016, a team of German scientists discovered that the Venus flytrap can actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect.

As part of their investigation, they genetically altered a flytrap so it glowed with a green fluorescence whenever it was "stimulated."

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

So you do think that the human body is well known and chartered? Wrong: Dutch scientists have discovered a new organ in the human body, a fourth pair of large salivary glands, tucked into the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat. (Seems I've got my Dutch week right now or something...)

Doctors May Have Found Secretive New Organs in the Center of Your Head (Published 2020)

They appear to be a fourth pair of large salivary glands, tucked into the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Free]

Dutch scientists have discovered a new organ in the human body, a fourth pair of large salivary glands, tucked into the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat.

That's where I store my spare keys.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Well it seems that NASA's OSIRIS REx probe managed to collect much more material than expected - so much that the excess has kept the "door" of the collector from closing all the way, allowing some of the material to leak out into space. It seems that any motion of the collector (or the whole probe) jars a tiny bit more of the sample material loose; so they've skipped some activities like tests and planned course-correction maneuvers while they work to get the sample stowed as quickly as possible while losing the least amount of material.

 

[Govi]

Well it seems that NASA's OSIRIS REx probe managed to collect much more material than expected - so much that the excess has kept the "door" of the collector from closing all the way, allowing some of the material to leak out into space. It seems that any motion of the collector (or the whole probe) jars a tiny bit more of the sample material loose; so they've skipped some activities like tests and planned course-correction maneuvers while they work to get the sample stowed as quickly as possible while losing the least amount of material.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

The joys of science aka "why playing god is a really really bad idea": Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programmes have invaded a Belgian cemetery.

Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a metre and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonising a historic Antwerp graveyard.

"It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research.

Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union.

Instead, the freshwater beasts, which are about 10cm big and voracious, are thought to have been bred by unscrupulous German pet traders in the 1990s.

They are similar to the slough crayfish found in Florida but are parthenogenetic, which means they reproduce with themselves and all their children are genetically identical females.

The mutation, which occurred about 25 years ago, means populations can spring up rapidly from just a single Procambarus virginalis.

In 2018, scientists established the global marbled crayfish population was descended from a single female and didn't need males to reproduce.

The EU banned possession and release of the uncanny crayfish in 2014 but it is impossible to trace the owners because all the crayfish are genetically exactly the same.

The crayfish have taken root in the pools and streams of the Schoonselhof cemetery in Antwerp, which is known as the Flemish city's Pere Lachaise.

Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over cemetery

Marbled crayfish can reproduce asexually and all their children are genetically females.

www.nzherald.co.nz

 

[Marita]

Well it seems that NASA's OSIRIS REx probe managed to collect much more material than expected

Here is another video explaining the possible problems.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Gotta wonder if that just doesn't happen all the time as frozen worms thaw out in the wild and we just don't know about it because we're not watching.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

After the invention of Vantablack now comes the discovery of superwhite! It's a white so white that it will make your bleached teeth look like dirt! It can reflect up to 95.5% of the sunlight, including infrared, and can keep surfaces painted with it -7.7 degrees Celsius cooler thain their ambient surroundings!

New 'Super-White' Paint Can Cool Down Buildings and Cars

The novel paint is so good that it could replace the need for air conditioning.

interestingengineering.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

NASA announced today that they've found evidence that there's some water molecules locked up in lunar dust even on sunlit portions of the Moon, which is great!

Sadly the NASA press conference immediately pivoted to stressing that this find somehow adds impetus for Artemis, which is the Trump initiative to land humans on the Moon again by 2024 to do things that probes can do more cheaply, just so history can attribute something to Trump.

In reality the amount of water they're talking about isn't a useful-to-exploration amount, nor is it really clear that it is meaningfully extractable in any case.