Earth might have a tiny new moon. On 19 February, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted a dim object moving quickly across the sky. Over the next few days, researchers at six more observatories around the world watched the object, designated 2020 CD3, and calculated its orbit, confirming that it has been gravitationally bound to Earth for about three years. An announcement posted by the Minor Planet Center, which monitors small bodies in space, states that “no link to a known artificial object has been found”, implying that it is most likely an asteroid caught by Earth’s gravity as it passed by.
Our new moon is probably between 1.9 and 3.5 metres across, or roughly the size of a car, making it no match for Earth’s primary moon. It circles our planet about once every 47 days on a wide, oval-shaped orbit that mostly swoops far outside the larger moon’s path. The orbit isn’t stable, so eventually 2020 CD3 will be flung away from Earth. “It is heading away from the Earth-moon system as we speak,” says Grigori Fedorets at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, and it looks likely it will escape in April.
NASA’s Apollo 13 was one of the space agency’s most incredible missions into space. With a goal of landing on the Moon, the mission hit a colossal snag when a spacecraft malfunction blew it off course and threatened the lives of the three-man crew. It took an around-the-clock effort to bring them back alive, and was ultimately deemed a “successful failure.” It was a trying time for the space agency as well as the astronauts aboard the doomed spacecraft. Rather than landing on the Moon, the crew used the Moon’s gravity to slingshot the spacecraft around and make a quick flight back to Earth. It wasn’t what anyone had planned, but it did provide the men with a glorious, up-close look at the Moon.
The two-minute clip opens in darkness to honor the crew that were in pitch black for eight minutes while sitting between earthset and sunrise. The sun then appears from around the corner, revealing the lunar surface's majestic craters and pot marks. Data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft now makes it possible to show what the Apollo 13 astronauts saw as they flew around the far side of the Moon. This video showcases visualizations in 4K resolution of many of those lunar surface views, starting with earthset and sunrise, and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control. Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes - they are not shown in "real-time."
Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician and trailblazer for racial justice who is one of the space agency's most inspirational leaders, has died. She was 101. Johnson died Monday of natural causes at a retirement community in Newport News, Va., family attorney Donyale Y. H. Reavis told The Associated Press. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement that Johnson "helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space. Her dedication and skill as a mathematician helped put humans on the moon and before that made it possible for our astronauts to take the first steps in space that we now follow on a journey to Mars."
Johnson initially worked with other black women in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Va., that wasn't officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Signs had dictated which bathrooms the women could use. Johnson focused on airplanes and other research at first. But her work at NASA's Langley Research Center eventually shifted to Project Mercury, the nation's first human space program. The esteemed mathematician was featured in the 2016 film "Hidden Figures," which told the story of a group of African-American women whose contributions were integral to NASA's initial space missions. Johnson was portrayed by the actress Taraji P. Henson in the movie, which won several awards.
Larry Tesler, a pioneer of personal computing credited with creating the cut, copy and paste as well as the search and replace functions, has died. He was 74. Tesler was not nearly as well known as computing giants such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But he played an early, central role in making computers accessible to people without computer engineering degrees, i.e. most of us. Xerox, the company for whom he developed the functions, tweeted out news of his death. “Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas,” the company’s tweet said. Cut, copy and paste and search and replace functions are used millions of times a day without users thinking twice about how they were developed or by whom.
But before Tesler’s work, computer users had to interact with clunky programs in different “modes,” where the same commands meant different things depending on how they were used. Even an expert like Tesler found that to be a problem. The elimination of modes opened the door to how computer users have interacted with personal computers for the last 40 years. Much of that work was done not at one of today’s tech giants, but at a computer lab at Xerox. Tesler stayed at Apple until in 1997. In 2001 he joined Amazon, where he served as vice president of shopping experience. He then went to Yahoo in 2005, where he was vice president of user experience and design. He was issued numerous patents while working at those firms.
The app that the Iowa Democratic Party commissioned to tabulate and report results from the caucuses on Monday was not properly tested at a statewide scale, said people who were briefed on the app by the state party. It was quickly put together in just the past two months, said the people, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. And the party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votes — which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone — was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials, according to David Jefferson, a board member of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.
That person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had agreed not to discuss details of the app, said that there were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.
“This app has never been used in any real election or tested at a statewide scale and it’s only been contemplated for use for two months now,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who also serves on the board of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.
From the summit of 10,000-foot Haleakala in Hawaii, 93 million miles away from the sun, the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has delivered its first look at our mass of incandescent gas, with never-before-seen detail. In the highest-resolution image of the sun's surface ever captured, features as small as 18 miles across are visible for the first time. The churning plasma of our nearest star resembles cellularlike formations, each one about the size of the US state of Texas. The Inouye Solar Telescope allows scientists a look at features on the sun that are three times smaller than anything visible before now. This closeup look is just the beginning of the new telescope's observations of the churning ball of million-degree plasma. The National Science Foundation says that during the first five years of the instrument's lifetime, the Inouye Solar Telescope is expected to collect more information about our sun's explosive behavior than all the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sun in 1612.
A gigantic nuclear furnace, the sun burns 5 million tons of hydrogen fuel every second and makes our life on Earth possible. With its 4-meter f/2 aperture -- the largest aperture of any solar telescope -- the hope is that this telescope will be able to map the magnetic fields within the sun's corona and help scientists better understand how changes can impact life on Earth. Captured on Dec. 10, 2019, this first image marks an informal start for the Inouye Solar Telescope, which is technically still under construction. When it formally begins operation, the 13-foot mirrored telescope will be the most powerful solar telescope in the world.
Robots are going to space, cleaning homes, working at hotels, caring for the elderly and giving museum tours. Next, they could be working in hospitals and medical clinics, drawing blood from human patients. An automated blood-sampling robot created by Rutgers University researchers performed as well or, in some cases, better than human medical professionals doing the same task, the university said Wednesday in a statement. The first human clinical trial of the blood-drawing robot showed that it could free up time for nurses and doctors to spend more time treating patients, instead of jabbing them with needles. The ultrasound image-guided robot finds the vein, punctures it with a needle and then draws blood. The robot also includes a centrifuge-based blood analyzer.
The results of the trial, which were published in the journal Technology, showed that the robot device had an "overall success rate of 87 percent for the 31 participants whose blood was drawn. For the 25 people whose veins were easy to access, the success rate was 97 percent." Previous studies have shown that health-care professionals have a success rate of 73 percent in patients without visible veins, 60 percent in patients without palpable veins and 40 percent in emaciated patients, the university said.
Almost three years ago, artist Simon Weckert noticed something unusual at a May Day demonstration in Berlin: Google Maps showed there was a massive traffic jam, even though there were zero cars on the road. Soon enough, Weckert realized that it was the mass of people, or more specifically their smartphones, that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street. And then he decided to do it himself. “The question was if it might be possible to generate something like this in a much simpler way,” Weckert says. “I don’t need the people. I just need their smartphones.” Google said in a statement. “We appreciate seeing creative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work better over time.” The company also notes that while it has figured out how to distinguish between cars and motorcycles, it does not yet have any way to filter for Weckert’s setup.
The plan was simple. Over the course of a day, Weckert would walk up and down a given street, mostly at random, towing his smartphone-packed wagon behind him. The effect wasn’t instantaneous; it took Google Maps about an hour to catch up. But eventually, inevitably, Weckert says his wagon would create a long red line in the app, indicating that traffic had slowed to a crawl—even though there wasn’t any traffic at all. He had effectively tricked the system into thinking a series of large buses were crawling back and forth. Weckert is not the first person to fool Google Maps, and there are more high-tech ways than renting out dozens of smartphones to accomplish the same goal. But for Weckert, the simplicity was the point.
Unless you're currently taking chemistry, it's probably something you haven't thought. Today is National Periodic Table Day! Scientists have been organizing elements based on their properties since the early 1800s, but the modern day periodic table didn't get its start until about 50 years later. A Russian chemist formulated the periodic law and created a version of the table. The current table features 118 elements. Gold, silver, oxygen and iron are just a few.
The periodic table has actually only just been ‘completed’ in the past year. Four new elements had their discoveries and names confirmed in 2016, and replaced the last few placeholder positions in the table. I say ‘completed’ because scientists are still trying to create elements beyond element 118, so in years to come an extra row may be required to accommodate new element entries.
The death of NBA star Kobe Bryant and eight others, including his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, rocked the sports world and beyond on Last Sunday. While some expressed their grief through Instagram captions and donations to the Mamba Sports Foundation, magician and Rubik’s Cube artist Steven Brundage turned to hundreds of cubes to pay tribute to the late Lakers shooting guard. After more than 20 hours of assembling and using 814 cubes, Brundage created a smiling portrait of Bryant, a technique credited to Giovanni Contardi.
He said that he wants to connect the cubes together to make it into one work of art and auction it off in order to “donate a portion of the proceeds to Kobe’s foundation or another that will carry on his legacy.” He’s also hoping to use more than 1,000 giant cubes to create an even bigger mural of Kobe in his honor. “There's nothing in the world that can prepare you for losing one of your heroes,” he told me. “Once the first wave of grief passed, I just sat on the floor and started working, almost in a trance. Usually, there is a design stage, but in this circumstance, I just threw myself into it. Maybe that was the way I needed to deal with the emotions I was experiencing.”
Microsoft Teams is collaboration software that allows groups of employees to work together remotely. To do so, team members must log in with usernames and passwords. How can employees be sure that they're logging into MS servers and not a hackers pretending to be Microsoft? This is done with digital certificates which authenticates sites that they are whom they claim to be. These certificates are issued by third party companies. But the certificates have expiration dates so that companies must prove that their sites are still active and correct. If a company doesn't renew the certificate in time, the third party cannot verify the site is legitimate, and access is denied.
This is what happened yesterday to Microsoft Teams. The Teams website's certificate expired and all users of MS Teams could not log in. Once the error was discovered, it takes time to rectify the problem. The Teams site was down yesterday from 9:00 am until nearly 4:30 pm. This was an embarrassing mistake for Microsoft to make for its flagship “Office hub” software, especially as the company started its own TV commercials for Teams recently. It’s also surprising to see Microsoft forget to renew a key certificate for Teams, especially when the company develops software like System Center Operations Manager to monitor for things like certificate expiration.
After more than 16 years studying the universe in infrared light, revealing new wonders in our solar system, our galaxy and beyond, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's mission has come to an end. Mission engineers confirmed at about 2:30 p.m. PDT (5:30 p.m. EDT) Thursday the spacecraft was placed in safe mode, ceasing all science operations. After the decommissioning was confirmed, Spitzer Project Manager Joseph Hunt declared the mission had officially ended. Launched in 2003, Spitzer was one of NASA's four Great Observatories, along with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The Great Observatories program demonstrated the power of using different wavelengths of light to create a fuller picture of the universe.
Among its many scientific contributions, Spitzer studied comets and asteroids in our own solar system and found a previously unidentified ring around Saturn. It studied star and planet formation, the evolution of galaxies from the ancient universe to today, and the composition of interstellar dust. It also proved to be a powerful tool for detecting exoplanets and characterizing their atmospheres. Spitzer's best-known work may be detecting the seven Earth-size planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system - the largest number of terrestrial planets ever found orbiting a single star - and determining their masses and densities. In 2016,following a review of operating astrophysics missions,NASA made a decision to close out the Spitzer mission in 2018 in anticipation of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which also will observe the universe in infrared light. When Webb's launch was postponed, Spitzer was granted an extension to continue operations until this year. This gave Spitzer additional time to continue producing transformative science, including insights that will pave the way for Webb, which is scheduled to launch in 2021.
