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A newly discovered, “potentially hazardous” asteroid almost the size of the world’s tallest skyscraper is set to tumble past Earth just in time for Halloween, according to NASA.

The asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) — just under the height of Dubai’s 2,716-foot-tall (828 m) Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will zoom past our planet at around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound, according to NASA (opens in new tab).

The bad news is NASA estimates that it tracks only about 40 percent of the asteroids large enough that they could cause calamity if they were to hit Earth. To save us, the space agency needs fair warning — years, not months or weeks — to muster the defenses in space needed to safeguard the planet.

“As we say, we can’t do anything about them unless we know about them, and when they might be a concern for us,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, said in an interview.

Unexpected Aftermath of First-of-Its-Kind Test Intrigues Astronomers

NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.” Its core values are “safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.”

Try out my quantum mechanics course (and many others on math and science) on https://brilliant.org/sabine. You can get started for free, and the first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

Welcome everybody to our first episode of Science News without the gobbledygook. Today we’ll talk about this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, trouble with the new data from the Webb telescope, what’s next after NASA’s collision with an asteroid, new studies about the environmental impact of Bitcoin and exposure to smoke from wildfires, a test run of a new electric airplane, and dogs that can smell mathematics.

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00:00 Intro.
00:35 Nobel Prize in Physics 2022
01:21 Trouble with data from Webb?
04:05 What’s next after NASA’s asteroid crash test?
06:48 New Study about the Environmental Impact of Bitcoin Mining.
08:38 Test of New Electric Aircraft.
09:42 New Study about Air Pollution from Wildfires.
10:44 Dogs Can Smell Maths.
12:19 Sponsor Message.

#science #technology #environment

The end of classical Computer Science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit.

I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers like the Commodore VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study Computer Science in college and ultimately getting a PhD at Berkeley, the bulk of my professional training was rooted in what I will call “classical” CS: programming, algorithms, data structures, systems, programming languages. In Classical Computer Science, the ultimate goal is to reduce an idea to a program written by a human — source code in a language like Java or C++ or Python. Every idea in Classical CS — no matter how complex or sophisticated — from a database join algorithm to the mind-bogglingly obtuse Paxos consensus protocol — can be expressed as a human-readable, human-comprehendible program.

When I was in college in the early ’90s, we were still in the depth of the AI Winter, and AI as a field was likewise dominated by classical algorithms. My first research job at Cornell was working with Dan Huttenlocher, a leader in the field of computer vision (and now Dean of the MIT School of Computing). In Dan’s PhD-level computer vision course in 1995 or so, we never once discussed anything resembling deep learning or neural networks—it was all classical algorithms like Canny edge detection, optical flow, and Hausdorff distances. Deep learning was in its infancy, not yet considered mainstream AI, let alone mainstream CS.

Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more.

Astronomers on a small slice of our planet’s surface, extending from southern and eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula, could actually watch it live with their telescopes. Among those were a half dozen stations joined together for a dedicated observing campaign organised by ESA’s Planetary Defence Office and coordinated by the team of observers of the Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC). As usual, when such a timely astronomical event happens, not all stations were successful in their observations: clouds, technical problems and other issues always affect real-life observations.

However, a few of ESA’s collaborating stations could immediately report a successful direct confirmation of DART’s impact. Among them was the team of the Les Makes observatory, on the French island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The sequence of images they provided in real time was impressive: the asteroid immediately started brightening upon impact, and within a few seconds it was already noticeably brighter. Within less than a minute a cloud of ejected material became visible and could be followed while it drifted eastwards and slowly dissipated.

Bet the dinosaurs wish they’d thought of this.

NASA on Monday will attempt a feat humanity has never before accomplished: deliberately smacking a spacecraft into an asteroid to slightly deflect its orbit, in a key test of our ability to stop cosmic objects from devastating life on Earth.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spaceship launched from California last November and is fast approaching its target, which it will strike at roughly 14,000 miles per hour (23,000 kph).

For Physics & Chemistry experiments for kids delivered to your door head to https://melscience.com/sBIs/ and use promo code DRBECKY50 for 50% off the first month of any subscription (valid until 22nd October 2022).

To find out whether you can see the partial solar eclipse on 25th October 2022 put in your location here: https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2022-october-25

To watch the next launch attempt for Artemis live at 6pm EST on Tuesday 27th September head to @NASA ‘s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMLD0Lp0JBg.
To watch the DART mission impact live on Monday 26th September 2022 head to @NASA ‘s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RA8Tfa6Sck.
My previous video on the DART mission: https://youtu.be/ZBhTtaTGhao.
My previous video on whether aliens exist (inc. Drake equation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihVzPl7Dys.
My previous Night Sky News debunking these JWST Big Bang Theory claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqfap3v0xxw.
My previous video chatting with Dr. Libby Jones about being in control of JWST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPO8pw8r7ak.
My previous video on the discovery of the star Earendel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChgsXbIgdw.
Welch et al. (2022; Earendel imaged with JWST — not peer reviewed) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.09007.pdf.
Welch et al. (2022; Earendel discovered with HST — behind pay wall) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04449-y.
Carter et al. (2022; JWST direct image exoplanet HIP 65426b — not peer reviewed) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.14990.pdf.
El Baldry et al. (2022; a black hole orbiting a Sun-like star — not peer reviewed) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.06833.pdf.

PDRs4ALL project (that imaged the Orion nebula with JWST) — https://pdrs4all.org/

00:00 — Introduction.
00:40 — Fireball meteor across Ireland & Scotland.
01:35 — Draconids & Orionids Meteor Shower.
03:05 — Mars, Jupiter & Saturn visible right now.
03:39 — Jupiter at Opposition 26th September.
04:27 — Partial Solar Eclipse 25th October 2022
06:13 — Artemis launch rescheduled.
07:08 — DART mission asteroid impact imminent.
07:48 — RIP Frank Drake 1930–2022
08:25 — JWST misinformation AGAIN
09:39 — JWST confirms Earendel is a star (or binary star system)
13:31 — JWST’s first direct image of an exoplanet HIP 65426b explained.
17:07 — JWST observes Orion nebula.
19:39 — New candidate for closest black hole (its orbiting a Sun-like star too!)
23:59 — Outro.
24:26 — MEL science.
26:17 — Bloopers.

📚 My new book, “A Brief History of Black Holes”, out NOW in hardback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!) Note, USA & Canada hardback out 1st November 2022: http://hyperurl.co/DrBecky.