Science & Engineering
One tortoise saved a species from extinction, then was quietly retired
The Española giant tortoise came within 15 animals of extinction. The rescue worked; the celebrity credit is more complicated.
Science & Engineering
Starlink satellites reveal atmospheric density map previously only possible in simulation
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.
Science & Engineering
Taxonomists named a stretchy-armed beetle genus after One Piece's Luffy
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.
Science & Engineering
Three black holes may be feeding in one ancient galaxy, though evidence remains uncertain
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.
Science & Engineering
Unfinished telescope spots 22 invisible objects carving the Helix Nebula
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.
Science & Engineering
Moon's rim stays bright enough to make deep eclipse look bitten, not red
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.
Science & Engineering
In 1927 a Brisbane physics professor melted a lump of tar and sealed it in a…
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.