Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
MHKBB posted a photo:
Alvar and Aino Aalto
Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss Planar T* 2.8/80 C
Film: Ilford XP2 Super
Lab: Prolab, Stuttgart
MHKBB posted a photo:
Alvar and Aino Aalto
Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss Planar T* 2.8/80 C
Film: Ilford XP2 Super
Lab: Prolab, Stuttgart
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that sailed alien seas, beat the heat, went retro, and got caught in the food web.
First, scientists make the case that Saturn’s moon Enceladus could resolve one of humanity’s greatest questions—are we alone in the universe?—if only we would just send a spacecraft there already. Then: an amoeba in hot water, a backwards-ass planet, and the prandial ouroboros we call life on Earth.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Aliens in the moon mist
In a double-whammy pair of studies, scientists have offered more proof that Enceladus—the tiny moon of Saturn—might host alien life, and that it would be relatively easy to find out for sure.
Enceladus is only 300 miles in diameter, but it contains marine multitudes. Underneath its outer ice shell, the moon hosts a subsurface ocean and hydrothermal vents on its seafloor, which are hotspots of life here on Earth.
What’s more, Enceladus squirts out watery plumes from its ocean through geysers on the surface, which can be sampled by passing probes. Indeed, the Cassini spacecraft—which orbited Saturn from 2006 to 2017—ran through this space sprinkler several times, providing our first taste of an extraterrestrial sea. However, that mission was not equipped to detect signs of life, known as biosignatures.
In the first of two new studies, researchers created a simulated version of Enceladus’s “soda ocean” (meaning it is alkaline and carbonate-rich). The team then dropped the heat-loving microbe Methanothermococcus okinawensis to live in this earthly ersatz Enceladus. This species was selected because it lives on deep-sea hydrothermal vents on Earth.
It turned out that M. okinawensis fared even better in this habitat than expected, a discovery that potentially widens “the habitability window of Enceladus’ subsurface soda ocean,” said researchers led by Vanessa Helmbrecht of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
In the other study, a team revisited Cassini’s observations of ice grains sprayed out into space by Enceladus. They discovered that the ocean droplets freeze slowly in space, causing organic molecules to separate out into concentrations of similar compounds. If these droplets contain biosignatures, they may be conveniently pre-sorted for any instrument that captures them.
“In the plume grains, each separated compound can then be found at strongly elevated concentrations in a relatively small fraction of ice grains,” said researchers co-led by Frank Postberg and Zenghui Zou of Freie Universität Berlin. “This is good news for future plume sampling missions investigating Enceladus’ promising habitability provided that they can sample and analyze ice grains individually.”
For years, mission concepts to Enceladus have been floated but never formally greenlit, including NASA’s Enceladus Life Finder or the European Space Agency’s L4 mission. Hopefully, something gets off the drawing board and into space eventually, because Enceladus is low-hanging fruit, astrobiologically speaking.
In other news…
Some (amoebas) like it hot
Speaking of weird heat-loving microbes, meet Incendiamoeba cascadensis, a newly discovered amoeba that has shattered the heat tolerance record for eukaryotic life.
Scientists found this novel species simmering in water temperatures exceeding 64°C (147°F) inside Hot Springs Creek at Lassen Volcanic National Park in California (for reference, the average hot tub is around 100°F). While simple “procaryotic” organisms can survive much hotter water—the microbe Methanopyrus kandleri tops out at a balmy 252°F—the upper thermal limit for more complex “eukaryotic” lifeforms was previously thought to be 60°C (140°F).
“Incendiamoeba cascadensis proliferates at temperatures beyond what was thought possible for any eukaryote,” said researchers led by Beryl Rappaport of Syracuse University. “This discovery raises questions about the true maximum temperature a eukaryotic cell can endure.”
If a human were exposed to these water temperatures, they would suffer third-degree burns in seconds—so let the amoebas have their win and leave the deadly hot springs to them.
Go Your Own Way (exoplanet cover)
If you’ve been feeling like the vibes are off, it’s probably because the planet GJ 3090 b is in retrograde—permanently. This world, which is about 4.5 times as massive as Earth, is the “first planet on a retrograde orbit discovered around an M dwarf,” a type of small star more commonly known as a red dwarf, according to a new study.
In our solar system, the concept of a planet being “in retrograde” refers to the optical illusion of planets appearing to move backwards in their orbits from our perspective on Earth. But GJ 3090 b is actually orbiting in the opposite direction of the rotation of the star, which is located 60 light years away.
Exoplanets with similar retrograde orbits have been observed before, but GJ 3090 b is distinct because there is no massive object (a star or planet) in the system that seems to have set it into reverse. Most retrograde orbits are caused by gravitational disruptions from such colossal companions, but this exoplanet may have just been born this way—meaning that it formed from a disk of material that was out-of-whack from the jump.
“Whereas highly misaligned orbits are commonly attributed to gravitational interactions with a massive companion, the architecture of the GJ 3090 system instead favors a primordial misalignment of the protoplanetary disk,” said researchers led by Yann Carteret of the University of Geneva.
The discovery is a reminder that star systems take on a wild variety of configurations shaped by countless interactions and factors. Contrary to the proverb, there is something new under every sun.
Eat, or be eaten, or all of the above
From the simplest microbe to the mighty blue whale, all life on Earth has one thing in common—we gotta eat. But given the dazzling complexity of food webs around the world, it can be tough to track what species end up in what bellies (or belly-equivalent) out in the wild.
That’s a problem that scientists are now inviting the public to help solve with the new online database: Who Eats Whom? In a partnership with the popular platform iNaturalist, the tool has catalogued some 14,000 observations of food-web interactions captured by nearly 2,000 observers from more than 100 countries, according to a new study about its progress.
“Who Eats Whom is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to create a global food web derived specifically from verifiable citizen science photographs,” said researchers led by Bradley C. Allf of Colorado State University. “Beyond our scientific goals, we are designing the project as a tool for education and public engagement in science.”
You can search for specific animals in the database (for example, searching for the red fox reveals a brave Australian python-eater, as well as this excruciating picture of the last moments of an Eastern chipmunk in Ontario with the caption: “not a great day”). I was also delighted to learn that coyotes, in addition to chasing down prey, apparently go on persimmon binges that leave behind seed-filled scat.
To get a sense of the bigger picture, you can check out this interactive global food web of species. We are, after all, what we eat—and what we eat eats, and so on forever.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
NEW YORK (ANP) - De Europese Commissie trekt bijna 710 miljoen euro uit voor ontheemden in Afrika en mensen die elders in de wereld door crises zijn getroffen. Commissievoorzitter Ursula von der Leyen maakte dat zaterdag bekend in New York, waar de Algemene Vergadering van de Verenigde Naties bijeen is.
Van het bedrag gaat 380 miljoen euro naar onder meer de bescherming van migranten, vrijwillige terugkeer en opvang van vluchtelingen in Afrika. Daarnaast is 10 miljoen euro bestemd voor vredesinitiatieven in het Grote Merengebied en 7,5 miljoen euro voor de bestrijding van ebola in Congo.
Brussel wil ook 252 miljoen euro uit de noodhulpreserve vrijmaken: 97 miljoen voor Afrika, 103 miljoen voor de Palestijnse gebieden en Libanon en 52 miljoen voor Oekraïne. Daarvoor is nog goedkeuring nodig van de begrotingsautoriteit. Ethiopië krijgt verder 60 miljoen euro om de eerstelijnszorg te verbeteren.
Preparation begins for extreme conditions as Nolo bears down on areas still recovering from previous storms
Heavy rain and powerful winds are expected to bring flash floods and extreme surf to the Hawaiian islands over the weekend as Hurricane Nolo bears down on areas still recovering from previous storms.
Nolo was churning slowly south of Hawaii’s Big Island on Saturday with maximum sustained winds of 105mph (165km/h). The storm’s center was about 145 miles (235km) south of Hawaii’s southern-most point and could strengthen into a potentially life-threatening and catastrophic storm through the weekend.
Continue reading...Alex de Minaur recovers from match point down to beat Alexander Zverev
Carlos Alcaraz launches comeback of his own to leave event level at 5-5
For much of his afternoon on court against Alexander Zverev, Alex de Minaur seemed destined to end his day with an excruciating defeat. De Minaur had rapidly found himself down a set and a break, then Zverev served for the match at 6-2, 5-4. After miraculously giving himself another lifeline, De Minaur finally faced a match point at 8-9 in the final set tie-break.
No matter how grim the scoreline appeared, though, every effort he made was punctuated by roars of approval from one person in particular. There were loud screams of encouragement, pounding of chairs and stamping of feet. At one point, as doubt had crept into Zverev’s game during the second set tie-break, that unmistakable voice from the sidelines yelled out: “Check his oil! Check his oil!”
Continue reading...It was another high-profile game when Thomas Tuchel’s England let a lead slip in the second half and went on to lose. But unlike the last time, it was not one for recriminations. The England support can accept losing when their team plays with cut and thrust. More to the point, they can accept losing to Spain who, at times, played football from a different stratosphere.
England were game. They were driven by Jude Bellingham, who ran on adrenaline and played to the point of maximum expression. They had positive surges either side of the interval, especially the one towards the end of the first half when goals from Anthony Gordon and Harry Kane put them in charge, hauling them back after Lamine Yamal’s second-minute goal.
Continue reading...More than 200 cats came to compete in the Romania International Cat Show, an international feline beauty contest known as the Feline Oscars, in Bucharest
Continue reading...
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Dear Lazyweb, please help me figure out why OBS keeps doing this crazy thing where sometimes audio goes into slo-mo dubstep glitch mode. Sometimes switching inputs fixes it. Sometimes only "sudo killall coreaudiod" fixes it. Here's what it sounds like. It seems to be doubling the spacing of the frames, and the buffer is infinite.
Even worse is that my check-volume.pl script fails to detect it much of the time. On this particular TS file it reports "glitchy: 27.4 dropouts/sec over 6.2 secs" but when scanning the live .m3u8 stream it often misses it.
Macmini9,1 macOS 14.8.7, OBS 32.2.2. OBS is reading audio and video from a Kiloview E1 NDI. Audio Hijack 4.6.0, but it "shouldn't" be involved in this?
RE: https://graphics.social/@metin/117337223438472772
Does this mean I get a new key sent by Lenovo to replace that ridiculous co-pilot key nobody asked for?
Various Editorials of 25 &26.
martinphoto11 has added a photo to the pool:
A Whistling Kite resting high on a branch, quietly watching its surroundings under the clear blue sky
stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:
I took this photo of “Amami no Sato” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during my visit to Kagoshima, Japan. This is the natural beauty of Amami Oshima. It’s a beautiful, sprawling Japanese garden with a variety of trees, rocks, ponds, and bridges, established in 1974 by Tokiemon Fuji. There’s also a museum dedicated to the history of Oshima tsumugi pongee, where visitors can learn about this gorgeous fabric. I loved the bright colors of the Bougainvillea plants…