In my dream, I was in the living room of the house in Berne. My parents told me that Chris had died in 1997. I started getting angry, then shouted. I was shouting, “Don’t you understand, I don’t have a family any more.” I was shouting and carrying on so much, that I began to froth at the mouth as if I had rabies. I could not control my emotions, nor my body, and I started shaking violently.
I woke up with the sunlight streaming through my balcony window, and birds and crickets outside in rice fields.
Who needs psychologists when all you need is a few good nightmares.
Researchers at Cornell have come up with a novel way to control a walking robot: with a mushroom.
Cornell explained in a press release that these four-legged “biohybrid” robots were built by researchers who literally grew mycelia, the belowground connective threads that allow fungal communities to communicate, into the robot itself.
Psyche! There are no “mycelial network” in space, and the drive would only work if we could somehow find a fifth spatial dimension (this was discussed a few years ago).
Too bad the spore drive is “laughably ridiculous,” said one scientist, and if all Star Trek ships had one, over half its episodes wouldn’t have happened.
“Normal means” for whom, exactly? I can’t imagine the average worker in Tokyo will be able to afford this thing. Even if they had a physical space to store in.
And, you know, I think I’ve seen a “flying vehicle” like this somewhere already… 🚁
Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day.
A study published this weekend in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyproposes that the oldest star in the Milky Way is a faint white dwarf that is about 10.7 billion years old and shining roughly 90 light years away from Earth.
OK, so my post about a big ole spider got the most likes of any post in ten years of blogging about science.
I have so not got the zeitgeist of the 2024 blogosphere lol – anyway, thanks, all, for the “likes”! Although one person used AI to write a very meaningless comment about arachnophobia. What’s the point, man?
By the way, back to science and space stuff. I forgot to post about the Europa Clipper project back in October.
So here you go. (It’s too late to add a message, but the project obviously is going to take some time arriving there, and you can supposedly hear US Poet Laureate Ada Limón read her poem online, although I’ve had trouble with the audio lately:
“Arching under the night sky inky with black expansiveness, we point to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth, we read the sky as if it is an unerring book of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky: the whale song, the songbird singing its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein. O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.”
The so-called Big Ring has a diameter of about 1.3bn light years, making it among the largest structures ever observed. At more than 9bn light years from Earth, it is too faint to see directly, but its diameter on the night sky would be equivalent to 15 full moons.
This is important because it contradicts the so-called “cosmological principle” that everything in the universe is basically evenly distributed.
Just thinking about it, though, it makes little sense to assume that galaxies are all evenly spaced. Assuming the Big Bang was a single point should not imply even spacing of anything.
FWIW the “Big Ring” is evidently more a corkscrew shape, directly aimed at us. Evidence of “cosmic strings”? Maybe.
This is not as interesting as technology that will allow us to build hotels and colonies at LaGrange points or communities on Mars, but it’s still interesting. Sorta. Maybe?
I was home, arguing at the dinner table. It was as if I were a teenager again. I’ve often dreamed of living in a bedroom with no ceiling over half of it, open to the night sky, with a solid rock wall on one side and sliding doors on another. This seemed to be the same house. Something like the house in Warrensburg, but somehow different. In other dreams, this house has slowly risen upward as if it were a growing tower of stone.
In this dream, I was at the dinner table. Then, suddenly I was on the back porch. It still looked like the “room” that had been set up for me when I was sleeping on the back porch between my freshman and sophomore years. Except in the dream, there was little furniture, no freezer, no old TV from my grandparents, just an old bed and some curtains. I was able to look through the kitchen wall and see the insides of the house, decrepit and broken plaster and wood.
I went to the barn to get my bicycle, and somebody came running up behind me just as I was about to leave the back yard. “Where is my bow and arrows?” I asked. He handed me a bow, but no arrows. I sped off down the side path to the street, and suddenly I was bicycling past the triangle park. Only it turned into a much large city-style park with large dumpsters and vending machines. A dump truck charged toward me, and as I veered away, it lurched back toward the park and disappeared.
Then I felt a pain in my mouth. Lifting a hand to my front teeth, I pulled out a large square and knew that my incisors had been removed.
