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Earth has a second moon…for another 300 years, anyway

November 14, 2021
MThomas

Kamo’oalewa is one such piece of lunar rubble that spiraled away from the moon. But rather than landing on Earth or simply tumbling off into the void, it found itself a quasi-satellite in its own right.
https://time.com/6116644/earth-second-moon/

Dunno what’s cooler: the name of the Moon fragment or the fact that the grad student at Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona that discovered the ”moon” is named ”Sharkey.”

Also, the complete and utter lack of visuals is appalling…plus the repetitive politically-oriented automatic videos and random ads irritates me. Honestly, WTF is up with US-based websites these days. Unreadable.

Still, it’s telling that the ”moon” has a Hawaiian name. Much like the navigator in my story…

Procrastinate, work, repeat

November 12, 2021
MThomas

Where’s the Artemis?? What’s up with Mars? And Ceres seriously…?

Sorry I haven’t kept up the story posts, everyone.

I know it’s been almost a month since the last Bringer of Light episode. Work just got dumped on me, and I can barely find time to give my writing students feedback. We switched back to face to face classes…with live streaming on Zoom for students who couldn’t or wouldn’t go back to campus…which is definitely NOT a teaching style I would recommend to anybody, anywhere, ever.

It’s been like laying down tracks in front of an oncoming train. Every day.

There is lots more good stuff for Riss and her crew, I swear. I’ve got drafts up to Chapter 42, and plots to the end after that. Let me see if I can get the next one up for you all in a day or two…

Shooting off like Spiderman!

October 5, 2021
MThomas

It’s “wrist-mist” to the rescue!

Apparently, this is designed to shoot alcohol into your hand “whenever and wherever you feel like it.”

Hmm. I don’t suppose a clever person could figure out what else to fill it with that would be easily slipped into someone’s drink or food. Or spray your own hand and then shake your enemy’s. Or touch his face.

Say, didn’t this happen already to a member of a certain pariah country’s ruling family?

And, uh, Spidey doesn’t just spray his hands. That’s not really how it works. Just saying.

(Plus, someone already made a web-shooter…)

Sigh.Way behind. Again.

September 18, 2021
MThomas

OK, I readily admit that I am once again waaaay behind on my scifi blogging.

At some point last week, I looked up from the mass amounts of work I had left to do and went, “Uh. August 21st? Was that really the last time I posted?”

Uh. Yup.

😣

I’ll do my best to get the rest of Riss’s story online on a biweekly basis, like I promised I would.

But promises…

Somebody’s planning to build an “impulse engine”

August 23, 2021
MThomas

In a video on the YouTube channel Bloomberg Quicktakes, Fearn and Woodward propose using the “Mach Effect Gravity Assist” drive to cut interstellar travel time down to within a human lifetime.
https://nerdist.com/article/star-trek-impulse-engines-mega-drive/

OK, so it’s “proposing” to build, not planning.

One website screams “they’re building it!”

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/81252/star-trek-impulse-engine-is-being-built-for-interstellar-travel/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3kiK79Adb8c0fTEm-PfPyDZqjw1dLbW3aokqNYublkcph5fD3zxSNL00c

SDMN (settle down mah nerds)

It’ll happen. Some day. Maybe.

Crap, I did it again

July 16, 2021
MThomas

Man, I did it again.

I forgot to post the next chapter of Bringer of Light.

Also the next one after that. And the one after that.

It’s been a very tiring summer so far.

(For starters, we STILL don’t have enough Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, doses are get wasted left and right as the elderly randomly cancel reservations and the bureaucratic pinheads in charge refuse to give them to others, and several students at my school went out drinking and guess what happened…)

I haven’t even posted any science news lately.

But I promise that I’ll make up for it. Soon.

In the meantime, here’s a neat little article about some wild theories of the universe, starting with the Brane Universe and the Big Splat.

Yeah. I thought you might like that one.

https://www.livescience.com/strange-theories-about-the-universe.html?utm_campaign=socialflow

When will the first baby be born in space?

May 26, 2021
MThomas

A permanent Moon colony? But I doubt babies will be born here any time soon…

“Today, all activity in space is tethered to the Earth. But I predict that in around 30 years people will start living in space – and soon after, the first off-Earth baby will be born.”
https://astronomy.com/news/2021/05/when-will-the-first-baby-be-born-in-space

Hmm, maybe. I’d be a little wary of making predictions about space travel. We were supposed to be building a base on Mars by now (according to predictions made when I was in high school).

I think we should probably figure out how to get people not to be completely fried by solar radiation before we start making babies in space (which *I* predict will inevitably require genetic manipulation and lead to a new human race at some point…and no, not in “around 30 years”!).

Scientists detect small pockets of carbon dioxide-rich liquid water in a meteorite dating from the early solar system

April 25, 2021
MThomas

“This assumption is consistent with recent theoretical studies of the solar system’s evolution that suggest that asteroids rich in small, volatile molecules like water and carbon dioxide formed beyond Jupiter’s orbit before being transported to areas closer to the sun.”
http://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/news/detail/?id=585

Just announced by my workplace!

And no, I don’t teach in that department.

However, it does show the need for STEM students and researchers in Japan to improve their English. For every study like this published in English there are many more only published in Japanese. Lots of interesting research going on in Japan that people *outside* Japan need to know about!

Still very much a work in process!

April 24, 2021
MThomas

Apologies to readers for the weird mix-up in chapter numbering. I’ve been (slowly, painfully slowly) writing Bringer of Light on Scrivener…which I forgot to update on my desktop PC, which led to some sort of weird misnumbering of chapters in two different versions of the file.

Anyway, I have begun to finish up the story but now I’m going back and doing some editing while continuing to finish the first book of the series off. I’ll be adding more details (especially about technology) while trying to keep the technobabble out and getting more focused on character interaction and development.

It’s a process, after all! Hope you’re enjoying it.

See here for a list of chapters so far (draft form).

Frogs embryos turned into xenobots

April 12, 2021
MThomas

Using blobs of skin cells from frog embryos, scientists have grown creatures unlike anything else on Earth, a new study reports. These microscopic “living machines” can swim, sweep up debris and heal themselves after a gash.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/frog-skin-cells-self-made-living-machines-xenobots/amp?__twitter_impression=true

The possibilities are endless…

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