Delta_V

...Exotic matter is a hypothetical form of matter theorized to contain unusual properties often characterized by a negative energy density, meaning it would have a negative mass or exert a repulsive gravitational force. Wormholes would require a shell of exotic matter, but just like wormholes, exotic matter has never been observed and is considered hypothetical.

“If you could somehow create that state of matter, then, according to general relativity, you could have a wormhole. But if you ask me whether that kind of matter is possible, I doubt it,”...

As of now, scientists don’t know enough about the characteristics of wormholes to confidently identify them, such as the types of situations that would create a wormhole, the properties of a wormhole, and how to detect said properties...

One key feature is that a wormhole would look like a sphere, not a hole, says Lupsasca, adding that to travel through a wormhole would be like “getting sucked into a ball and then expelled from another ball.”...

Imagine living in a two-dimensional world, like a sheet of paper. When that sheet of paper is folded over . . . these separate locations in “space-time” are joined together in much the same way a wormhole might do. Similarly, if a person were to go through a wormhole, it would change their location in both space and time.

The director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center announced her resignation Monday, marking yet another high-profile departure as questions loom about the agency’s budget and future.

Makenzie Lystrup, who has served as director of the center in Maryland since April 2023, will leave the agency on Aug. 1, according to a NASA statement.

Lystrup’s resignation comes less than two months after Laurie Leshin stepped down as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

...more than 280 current and former NASA employees signed a letter to Sean Duffy, NASA’s interim administrator, stating that the Trump administration’s recent policies “have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”

The agency did not provide a reason for Lystrup’s resignation.

NASA said Monday that Cynthia Simmons, Goddard's deputy director, will take over as acting center director in August.

For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.

And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.

...For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer.

...“US tech giants own not only the services we engage with but also everything below, from chips to connectivity to cables under the sea to compute to cloud. If that infrastructure turns off, we have nowhere to go.”

...But as difficult and expensive as it will be for US allies to escape the enshittification of American power—it will be much harder for Americans to do so, as that power is increasingly turned against them. As WIRED has documented, the Trump administration has weaponized federal payments systems against disfavored domestic nonprofits, businesses, and even US states. Contractors such as Palantir are merging disparate federal databases, potentially creating radical new surveillance capabilities that can be exploited at the touch of a button.

In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.

non-paywall link: https://archive.is/Ea7hb

"This is literally all the kids coming together and trying to figure out what to do about the drunk dad."...Privately, German officials say spending more on the military and working more closely with European partners is the right strategy for the current moment, no matter what Mr. Trump and his administration might do next...

Steven E. Sokol, president of the nonprofit American Council on Germany, said he welcomed the increased cooperation but expressed worry that it might end up hurting Washington.

"As we upset the apple cart and push some of our allies away, they will find other partnerships," he said of Trump administration policy. "I wonder if, down the line, that’s in the best interest of the United States."

...The interface is in the form of a handheld, sensor-equipped tool that can attach to many common collaborative robotic arms. A person can use the attachment to teach a robot to carry out a task by remotely controlling the robot, physically manipulating it, or demonstrating the task themselves...

Because the planet’s orbit is just seven days long, the gravitational forces from this orbital path tug at the star until plasma erupts from the surface...Heat causes the air to swell, increasing the cross‑section that stellar ultraviolet rays can hit, and leading to a vicious cycle that accelerates mass loss.

If the current pace holds, HIP 67522 b could shed enough hydrogen and helium to shrink into a mini‑Neptune within 100 million years.

It may even become a bare, rocky core after that. Such transformations explain why many mature planetary systems harbor small sub‑Neptunes while very close giant planets are rarer.

Similar run‑away erosion may have sculpted planets like CoRoT‑7 b, where today only a scorched super‑Earth remains...

“We now have direct evidence that not only was the ice gone, but that plants and insects were living there,”...Near‑complete melting of Greenland’s ice over the next centuries to a few millennia would lead to some 23 feet of sea‑level rise.

Defining the minimal genetic requirements for cellular life remains a fundamental question in biology...Here, we report the discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, a novel archaeon with an unprecedentedly small genome of only 238 kbp —less than half the size of the smallest previously known archaeal genome...lacking virtually all recognizable metabolic pathways, and primarily encoding the machinery for its replicative core: DNA replication, transcription, and translation. This suggests an unprecedented level of metabolic dependence on a host, a condition that challenges the functional distinctions between minimal cellular life and viruses...

...when atacamite is exposed to a magnetic field, its temperature changes, a rare and valuable behavior that could help shape the future of cooling technologies...

Journal article:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.216701

...This warmth acts as a natural incubator for the giant eggs, which span 18 to 20 inches in width and require an extended gestation period of four years.

This unique environment accelerates the development of young Pacific white skates, giving them a vital advantage in the harsh conditions of the deep sea. The interaction between the volcano and marine life demonstrates the profound influence geological features can have on biological processes...

Conventional robots can easily be modeled as rigid links connected by joints, but it remains an open challenge to model and control biologically inspired robots that are often soft or made of several materials, lack sensing capabilities and may change their material properties with use. Here, we introduce a method that uses deep neural networks to map a video stream of a robot to its visuomotor Jacobian field (the sensitivity of all 3D points to the robot’s actuators). Our method enables the control of robots from only a single camera, makes no assumptions about the robots’ materials, actuation or sensing, and is trained without expert intervention by observing the execution of random commands...Because it enables robot control using a generic camera as the only sensor, we anticipate that our work will broaden the design space of robotic systems and serve as a starting point for lowering the barrier to robotic automation.

...With an estimated mass of around 100 times that of Earth or 0.3 times the mass of Jupiter, TWA 7b is ten times lighter than any exoplanet previously directly imaged.

TWA 7b was discovered in the debris rings that surround the low-mass star CE Antilae, also known as TWA 7, located around 111 light-years from Earth.