Science

All hail the new BOAT: brightest of all time!

NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP) has flown close enough to the sun to detect the fine structure of the solar wind close to where it is generated at the sun's surface, revealing details that are lost as the wind exits the corona as a uniform blast of charged particles.

It's like seeing jets of water emanating from a showerhead through the blast of water hitting you in the face.

In a paper to be published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park, report that PSP has detected streams of high-energy particles that match the supergranulation flows within coronal holes, which suggests that these are the regions where the so-called "fast" solar wind originates.

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New York City had the worst air quality in the world on Tuesday.

Push for better pay and benefits among US scientists arrives at world’s largest biomedical funder.

From the article:

A new experiment uses superconducting qubits to demonstrate that quantum mechanics violates what's called local realism by allowing two objects to behave as a single quantum system no matter how large the separation between them. The experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe works—it's not even the first to do so with qubits.

But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin. Because the qubits are so easy to control, the experiment provides a new precision to these sorts of measurements. And the hardware setup may be essential for future quantum computing efforts.

In one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, it’s a boom time — water-intensive microchip companies and data centers moving in; tens of thousands of houses spreading deep into the desert. But it is also a time of crisis: Climate change is drying up the American West and putting fundamental resources at ever greater risk.

The decision by Arizona in the past week to limit residential construction in some parts of the fast-growing Phoenix suburbs is another major warning about how climate change is disrupting lifestyles and economies in the West. Throughout the region, glaciers have receded, wildfires have expanded, rivers and lakes have shrunk. It has been a wet winter, but the deeper trends brought on by the warming atmosphere persist.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/432614

This renewed interest in UFOs – excuse me, "UAPs" – is honestly pretty fascinating.

It's clear that a nontrivial amount of UFO reports over the years have been "real" in the sense that there was really something there to be seen, but I'd figure most do have a completely mundane explanation – anything from prototype aircraft to weather balloons (har har.) Then there's a few that seem to completely defy explanation, which is the fascinating part. Lately there's been more official clips released, so it seems like it's not quite as taboo of a subject and likely to kill your career as a pilot or whatever as it has been.

This vertically oriented logarithmic map spans nearly 20 orders of magnitude, taking us from planet Earth to the edge of the Observable Universe. The scheme locates notable astronomical objects of various scales: spacecraft, moons, planets, star systems, nearby galaxies, and notable large-scale structures are some of the objects indicated.

An endeavor to provide a concise yet comprehensive view of the Big Picture, with a meticulous and realistic approach to presenting a wide range of astronomical knowledge through thoughtful design.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1136574

Da Vinci's sketches, which were forgotten for decades, show triangles formed by sand-like particles pouring from a jar. These falling grains depicted experiments to show that gravity was a form of acceleration more than 400 years before Einstein did, a new study argues.