The loose copper hairs of Project West Ford fell back within a few years. The clumps that never came apart are another story: two public satellite catalogues still list about three dozen in orbit.
Since its rediscovery in 2013, the report has stood as a candidate for the first time space weather interfered with a piece of human technology. A study published on 16 September finds that the line from Exeter to Starcross did not open until 30 May 1846, and points instead to a magnetogram trace recorded at Greenwich on the evening of 18 October 1848.
A team working with ALMA puts the odds of that alignment arising by chance at about 0.07 percent, and reads it as evidence that the incoming gas is what set the outer ring's angle. The paper's own accounting complicates that: the stream's total angular momentum is well short of the disk's, and on the narrower measure of angular momentum per unit mass the paper says the two are within error bars of each other.
The result comes in at 3.2 and 3.5 sigma under one way of cleaning the data and at 5.9 and 9.18 sigma under another. Both pairs are in the paper's abstract.
Cat bones from the Klondike goldfields and a cave near Old Crow had been tentatively identified as puma. Mitochondrial genomes say they are Miracinonyx trumani, and the bone chemistry of the northern animals has a parsimonious explanation, the authors write: an aquatic food chain.
Earth's magnetospheric cusp, the funnel that lets solar wind particles down toward the atmosphere, peaks close to local noon. A survey of Cassini magnetometer and plasma data found 67 crossings at Saturn, and once the count was normalised by how long the spacecraft spent at high latitude, the occurrence rate peaked at 13 to 15 local time. Three crossings sat near 20 local time, somewhere Earth's cusp is hardly ever seen.
The gut contents of 356 female orb weavers, collected in a single October and sequenced family by family, put the introduced spider's prey list statistically distinct in composition from its neighbours' while overlapping them on many prey families, and wider on a count the authors say likely reflects how many of each spider were caught. Native gut contents at Joro-occupied sites were not distinguishable from those at sites with no Joros.
Declassified CIA and National Reconnaissance Office histories record how the August 1960 mid-air catch of the Discoverer 13 capsule went wrong, why the capsule carried no film, and how a plan to swap it before it reached the President stayed on paper.
The 1978 crash of Kosmos 954 is the rare satellite accident that came with an itemized invoice. The paper trail, from the ambassador's assurance to the C$3 million settlement, is stranger than the legend.
The Española giant tortoise came within 15 animals of extinction. The rescue worked; the celebrity credit is more complicated.
A researcher at Kyoto University says the technique had only ever been tested on numbers a computer generated. He has now run it 19 times on public Starlink data and checked the answer against two European satellites that derive density from their own GPS tracking.
Two entomologists described the genus from four pinned specimens collected in Yunnan and Laos, and wrote the reason for the name into the paper. It is about proportions, not powers.
Webb's integral field spectrograph split one lopsided hydrogen line into two, then turned up a third in the galaxy's outskirts. The mass estimates could be off by a factor of ten, and the paper's own hedges run heavier than the headlines built on it.
Five of MOTHRA's eventual 30 mounts were working when the array was aimed at the Helix as a commissioning target. Almost nothing is visible at the centre of any of the 22 bow shocks it found, and the way their size collapses with distance puts a rough number on how long a fragment of a dead star lasts once the interstellar medium gets hold of it.
NASA’s decade table puts the umbral magnitude at 0.930, deeper than any other partial lunar eclipse between 2021 and 2030 except one. The 96 percent figure in circulation measures the Moon’s area, not its width.
The pitch drop experiment at the University of Queensland is the world's longest-running laboratory experiment. The tar inside looks like a solid and breaks like hard toffee when struck, yet it has been quietly falling, one rare drop at a time, for nearly a hundred years.
