I got two bone spurs, separated by two years, thanks to playing baseball in junior high school. Both were fingers on my left hand.
The first time was my left thumb first joint. The second time was my left hand ring finger second joint.
Both times, our local health clinic doctor put a metal splint on the finger, wrapped it in flexible bandage and sealed it off with a tiny metal clip.
And of course I stupidly went on playing baseball, because at age 15 guys think they are completely indestructible.
My ring finger stuck out when I batted. I’m lucky I didn’t get hit by a pitch in the hand (I did get hit on the knee, but that’s a whole ‘nother story).
Also, it inspired my baseball novel. So there was a silver lining!
Of all the asteroids they modeled, the one with the largest risk of impact was a kilometer-wide asteroid known as 1994 PC1. Over the next thousand years, the probability that 1994 PC1 will cross within the orbit of the Moon is a paltry 0.00151%, hardly worth worrying about.
Thanks to Glen Hill over at Engagin’ Science (formerly Scientia, which apparently was far too Latin- and science-esque for search engines to handle) for bringing this (not-so Earth-shattering) info to my attention.
Sorry, folks. Hollywood was once again wrong (sigh).
The word has just come in that a fellow traveler has set up his own blog about science.
It’s called Science.
(In Latin, Scientia.)
Glen is a good friend of mine, and not only is he a good scientist, he’s also a good writer. His avowed goal is to raise science literacy and share his love of science with the world.
We may even steal posts from each other from time to time. Or photos (like the one above ⬆️🌏).
While not perfect, this is some seriously scary stuff.
FWIW the researchers themselves did recognize this…
Although it’s nowhere near being able to decode spontaneous thoughts in the real world, the advance raises concerns that, with improvement, the technology might mimic some type of mind reading. “Our thought when we actually had this working was, ‘Oh my God, this is kind of terrifying,’” Huth recalls.
Participants have to consent to being “read,” and there are ways to prevent the software from figuring out even the “gist” of what they were thinking.
Still, imagine if some nefarious criminal group (or governmental agency, if there is a difference) decided to force someone to consent to have their thoughts read.
Long distance.
Permanently.
It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish scifi from reality.
“I was quite surprised by how simple the story hiding behind the curtain of complexity in the data,” Sneppen continued. “You have this immensely complex physics, unimaginable dense stars and the birth of a black hole — and then it all reduces to this beautiful sphere.”
The neutron stars that crashed into each other are “dense and compact,” Sneppen said. They only measured around 20 km in diameter — about 12 miles — but they are “heavier than the sun,” he said. “A teaspoon of neutron star matter weighs more than Mount Everest.”
First reported in 2017, a new study in Nature gives more details about a “kilo nova” only detected by using gravitational waves. The collision led to the formation of a black hole.
Fortunately, this sort of cosmic event doesn’t occur too often. But..
…if a kilonova were to occur in the Milky Way — less than 30,000 light- years away — it would be the brightest star in the night sky, making it discoverable to the human eye…
Still, it’d be safer for Earth if it never happened…
At liftoff time, smoke was seen rising from the bottom of the rocket, indicating the ignition of the main engine. However, the rocket did not rise from the launchpad.
A Japanese telescope positioned on top of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, captured video of an eerie flying spiral in the night sky on Jan. 18.
In the video, a small bright spot appears and slowly gets brighter and starts to dissipate into a spiral before getting small again and disappearing.
In fact, it was the remains of a discarded Falcon 9 booster from the launch of a SpaceX satellite. And it isn’t the first time this has happened. Japanese TV talked about this, too (since it was a Japanese astronomy, at the Subaru Telescope, that first recorded it).
So, an Identified Flying Object!
Yay, more metallic junk.
(Thanks to Glen Hill for bringing this article to my attention.)
The feat, which involved firing powerful laser pulses at thunderclouds over several months last year, paves the way for laser-based lightning protection systems at airports, launchpads and tall buildings.
Canadian researchers said the rock was found in rural Somalia two years ago, but locals believe it is much older.
They call the stone Nightfall, and say it is documented in poems, songs and dances that stretch back five generations. It is used today to sharpen knives.
The “new” rock is apparently a meteorite that fell to Earth at least 100 years ago (or more, depending on how you define a “generation”). The two newly-identified minerals are being called “elaliite” (after El Ali, Somalia) and “elkinstantonite” (after NASA planetary evolutionary expert Lindy Elkins-Tanton).
And there’s still one more as-yet-unidentified mineral in the 70-gram rock fragment at the U of Alberta (the original is about 15 tons, and is reported to be the 9th largest such meteorite to have survived entering the Earth’s atmosphere). These three minerals evidently do not exist naturally on Earth. Makes you wonder how many other such minerals are still floating around in space.
And of course, how they might be used to make incredibly strong yet flexible spacecraft materials. (FWIW NASA was already talking about “new” materials such as carbon nanotubes and self-healing piezoelectronic “skins” some twenty years ago…)
Now, maybe it’s just me, but I have a feeling that a 15-ton rock falling into the desert would have raised all sorts of hell. At least locally. Nothing like a 143,000 ton rock, of course. Is there really no record of this thing falling out of the sky? Maybe it’s time to talk to non-European communities and to take their oral legends a bit more seriously.
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