SpaceX Starship SN10 soars, nails landing for first time!
SpaceX’s test fight of the Starship SN10 prototype was a success!
Credit: SpaceX
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‘Space hurricane’ spotted above Earth for the first time ever
A first-ever “space hurricane” was spotted whirling above the Earth, scientists said.
The 600-mile-wide mass of plasma occurred several hundreds of miles above the North Pole, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications.
“Until now, it was uncertain that space plasma hurricanes even existed, so to prove this with such a striking observation is incredible,” said Mike Lockwood, a space scientist at the University of Reading and co-author of the study, in a statement.
Astronauts Explore Caves on Earth, Learning the Skills They’ll Need for the Moon and Mars
A unique training program has teams of astronauts spending time inside caves doing experiments and learning to work together in a challenging environment.
We’re accustomed to astronauts pulling off their missions without a hitch. They head up to the International Space Station for months at a time and do what they do, then come home. But upcoming missions to the surface of the Moon, and maybe Mars, present a whole new set of challenges.
One way astronauts are preparing for those challenges is by exploring the extreme environment inside caves.
Debunking myths about renewable energy
Critics of renewable energy often cite two reasons for why they think a transition from fossil fuels will take half a century. Firstly, that sources of renewable energy are too intermittent to be reliable and secondly, that governments cannot bear the costs of switching entire economies to clean energy.
Second Order Optical Merons, or Light Pretending to Be a Ferromagnet
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Scientists have demonstrated how to structure light such that its polarization behaves like a collective of spins in a ferromagnet forming half-skyrmions (also known as merons). To achieve this, the light was trapped in a thin liquid crystal layer between two nearly perfect mirrors. Skyrmions, in general, are found, e.g., as elementary excitations of magnetization in a two-dimensional ferromagnet but do not naturally appear in electromagnetic (light) fields.
One of the key concepts in physics, and science overall, is the notion of a “field” that can describe the spatial distribution of a physical quantity. For instance, a weather map shows the distributions of temperature and pressure (these are known as scalar fields), as well as the wind speed and direction (known as a vector field). Almost everyone wears a vector field on their head — every hair has an origin and an end, just like a vector. Over 100 years ago L.E.J. Brouwer proved the hairy ball theorem which states that you can’t comb a hairy ball flat without creating whorls, whirls (vortices), or cowlicks.
