Planet Earth-“Life as We Know It Hinges on One Very Small Decimal Apocalypse”

 

Life as We Know It Hinges on One Very Small Decimal, The Atlantic. –he fine-structure constant has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure number that shapes the universe to an astonishing degree—“a magic number that comes to us with no understanding,” as Richard Feynman described it. Paul Dirac considered the origin of the number “the most fundamental unsolved problem of physics.”

A warming world is expanding the range of deadly diseases and risking an explosion of new zoonotic pathogens from the likes of bats, mosquitoes, and ticks, reports Jeff Goodell for Rolling Stone.

The result highlights a fundamental tension: Either the rules of quantum mechanics don’t always apply, or at least one basic assumption about reality must be wrong, reports Quanta.

 The third early data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia Space Observatory launched in 2013 delivers data for just over 1.8 billion sources. Initial findings include the first optical measurement of the acceleration of the Solar system’s orbit through the Milky Way.

The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan’s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge, reports The New York Times.

Preliminary analysis of a far-flung island cluster suggests that what we thought were several small, independent volcanoes might actually be a single eruptive behemoth, reports National Geographic. The behemoth in question is marked by a semi-circular cluster of peaks in the Aleutian Islands known as the Islands of the Four Mountains (IFM). Long thought to be independent volcanoes, the six peaks—including Herbert, Carlisle, Cleveland, Tana, Uliaga, and Kagamil—may actually be a series of connected vents along the edge of a much larger volcanic caldera.

“We can see that in our own civilization. We have been to the moon and on Mars we have several robots already. But there aren’t a whole lot of UFOs from the billions of Earth-like exo-planets in the habitable zones of the stars, so life and technological civilizations in particular are probably still fairly scarce.”

 Luke Dormehl for Digital Trends –“Building a honeybee brain in silicon could help develop sophisticated navigation tools that could be lightweight, ultra-low-powered, and orders of magnitude more efficient than the deep learning approaches,’ said David Rajan, CEO of Opteran. The company’s technology could power future drones, autonomous vehicles, and various robots.”

Photon-based quantum computer does a calculation that ordinary computers might never be able to do, reports Nature.

“We are honoring 20 scientists, engineers, and visionaries who helped make this dark year a little brighter,” reports Becky Ferreira. Scientist.–Chang’e 5 landed in an unexplored area of the moon called Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms. “It’s a region where there are these really volcanically young landforms, and we currently don’t have samples in the Apollo samples or the Russian samples that have anything like that, so these samples will really enable some new science,” says Kerri Donaldson Hanna at the University of Central Florida. Scientist. Bizarre volcanoes that ooze ice magma or explode like geysers reveal the geological rumblings beneath other worlds. Some might even provide the spark for alien life.

 a new theory suggests, reports Live Science. And we could be making these teensy singularities all the time at the world’s largest atom smasher, a new study shows. If we could make these objects, they could be a window into the mysterious nature of gravity. If a microscopic black hole does make an appearance in the data, it would mean that what we think of as the universe is just a small bubble embedded in a much larger framework — and we would have to completely rewrite our understanding of gravity.

The giant radio telescope had special features that aren’t easily replaced, reports Science News. In August and November, two cables supporting a 900-metric-ton platform of scientific instruments above Arecibo’s dish unexpectedly broke. After assessing the damage, the National Science Foundation, which funds Arecibo, announced that the telescope could not be safely repaired and would be torn down. But before the telescope could be dismantled, the entire instrument platform crashed down into the dish on December 1.