Comment Thinner and lighter (Score 1) 24
One-third the cost of an iPhone Duo.
Also probably foldable.
Once.
Submission + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.
Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.
We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.
But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.
Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”
Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.
We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.
But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.
Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”
Comment Re:This is the practice since 2019 (Score 1) 70
Pretty sure whatever he died from came from bats. Or hamsters
- 'She', not 'he', AIUI. I can assure you from personal experience that anatomically Russians are indistinguishable in all important respects from other humans.
- Or more likely marnosets. The commonest vector for plague in this region is the mamoset. I'm not even sure hamsters are found within several thousands km of this area.
- The disease has a long history in this area. A recent article : "Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586... Nature Vol654 697, 18 June 2026
"Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years)."
Comment Re:We're all slightly resistent anyway (Score 1) 70
We're all the descendents of the people who for whatever genetic reason survived the plagues in the past and thats why plaque hasn't reoccured as an epidemic since the middle ages.
Except - that was our (mostly) ancestors acquiring a degree of immunity to a strain of the bacterium circulating 250 and more years ago.
It's fairly unlikely that current wild-type strains are the same strain.
Bacteria do evolve in the wild, you know. (Everything evolves in the wild.)
Comment "Transform"? (Score 1) 39
Come on - we've seen the advertising Miami put out to the rest of the world. There is no transformation necessary.
Comment Barbarians! (Score 1) 1
It is the God-sold (not "-given" ; TANSTAAFL) duty of all US people to pay homage to the God of consumption at all times. What do you think that million bucks in the back pocket of "No-tab Kegsbreath" was for?
Comment Weâ(TM)re already doing this (Score 3, Informative) 65
https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...
And DARPA has a whole program for it:
Comment Sounds like ISAC (Score 2) 39
This is something folks are working on for 6g -- integrated sensing and communication.
https://www.qualcomm.com/resea...
Basically, hey, you've got all these devices pumping out signals everywhere at all kinds of wavelengths; if you receive and process them you can pretty much build a 3-D scene.
Comment Reddit have 11 year-long accounts? (Score 1, Funny) 187
I thought they required you to create a new account every time you log in.
Though that may have been 20 years ago. Last time I saw a reason to go there.
Comment Littleton(TM)? (Score 1) 32
I had no idea that the good people of Littleton, Massachusetts had trademarked the name of their town.
I look forward to their lawsuit against those imposters over in Colorado.
Comment Old books, you say? (Score 1) 114
My parents built up a pretty decent collection of Horatio Alger's highly formulaic rags-to-riches "dime novels" from around 1868-1910. Perhaps AI would like to ingest many, many stories of plucky and hard-working young men who wind up making it big?
Comment Re:Eating Komodo Dragon (Score 1) 19
But if fewer people performing this behaviour died of starvation (or were too low in nutritional status to raise offspring to maturity - same thing really) than died of Salmonella it would still be a net benefit.
Comment Similar stuff on other sites too (Score 1) 44
There have been a lot of model-poisoning spam over on Quora too. Notably in service of pump-and-dump manipulation of stocks belonging to companies that are basically circling the drain (off the top of my head, seen NXXT, RIME, MYNZ->QUCY, DVLT, NRED and maybe one other I'm forgetting). When you can create tons of accounts, post tons of AI-generated slop that just occasionally casually mentions whatever "fact" you want the models to ingest, and so on, all for "free" or so close as to make no difference, I guess this is what you get.
Comment Re:Similar to that of Pluto, but let's sensational (Score 1) 31
I looked up the figures a few days ago - but having since driven to the other end of the country, I've forgotten the precise details. IIRC it was something like Goofy having a higher aphelion - so most of the time (and length of orbital arc) it is going to be further out than Pluto (by a few %, but it also has higher eccentricity, so it's aphelion is lower than Pluto's (and indeed, Neptune's ; which is also true for Pluto). Since orbiting objects travel faster at aphelion than perihelion, that makes the average orbital period of Pluto and Goofy the same (or their year the same, or their semi-major axis the same ; these all mean the same thing) despite Goofy travelling further per orbit than Pluto, with a faster arc near perihelion.
You see the same sort of thing with, say, Uranus, Neptune, and 1P/Halley ; Halley and Uranus have quite similar orbital periods, but Halley's aphelion is well out beyond Neptune's orbit. the long period it spends out there is counterbalanced by the 3 year long Sun-dive it does form (approximately) Saturn's orbit, to the Sun, and back out to Saturn's orbit.50-odd% of it's orbital path followed in about 5% of it's orbital period.
Just because Newton's laws are quite simple, doesn't mean that their consequences are simple. Just ask (if you can get his bones to talk) one J. Kepler, who had to work out the orbits from raw observational data, unsullied by Newton's theoretical framework.
(It still sometimes astonishes me that there is no simple way to calculate the length of an arc of an ellipse or it's total perimeter - you have to do a really complicated, progressive approximation calculation for each specific shape of ellipse. Which, when you realise that Kepler would have had to make hundreds (thousands?) of such approximations while reducing Brahe's data, explains why Kepler came up with at least one relatively good approximation to the length of an ellipse's perimeter.)
Comment Re:My SciFi dream is still Fusion to Synfuel (Score 1) 183
hey combine hydrogen from with carbon dioxide,
Hydrogen from what or where?
If, like almost all *industrial* hydrogen, it comes from cracking natural gas, that's as something pure magenta (whatever the complimentary colour to green is).
(Our "analytical grade" hydrogen was probably sourced from electrolysis - certainly when we made it on site, it was ; but that was substantial cost of equipment and maintenance time. Our systems really cared about contaminants at the part-per-million level.)
