The 911 angel number is a profound and captivating numerical sequence that holds the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of our spiritual nature and our connection to the divine. Embracing the transformative power of the 911 angel number requires a willingness to let go of old patterns, beliefs, and attachments that no longer serve our highest good. This numerical sequence invites us to step into a new phase of our spiritual journey, one that is marked by personal empowerment, intuitive awakening, and a deeper connection to the divine.
By recognizing the 911 angel number as a divine invitation, we can cultivate a mindset of openness, trust, and receptivity. This allows us to align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with the high-vibrational energies of this numerical sequence, unlocking its potential for manifestation, healing, and transformation.
One powerful way to harness the transformative power of the 911 angel number is through the practice of visualization and affirmation. Imagine yourself embodying the qualities of the number 9, such as compassion, spiritual enlightenment, and the willingness to let go of the past. Affirm your readiness to embrace the new beginnings and personal empowerment represented by the number 1. Visualize yourself stepping into this higher vibration, radiating light and positivity in all areas of your life.
Additionally, incorporating the 911 angel number into your daily spiritual rituals and practices can further amplify its effects. This may involve creating a sacred space where you can meditate on the number, light candles or incense infused with its energies, or even incorporate it into your journaling or tarot work. By weaving the 911 angel number into the fabric of your spiritual routine, you can deepen your connection to the divine and allow its transformative power to unfold in profound and meaningful ways.
As you continue to encounter the 911 angel number in your life, remember to approach it with a sense of wonder, curiosity, and trust. This numerical sequence is a divine gift, a signpost on your spiritual path that invites you to let go of the old, embrace the new, and step into the fullness of your authentic self. By heeding the call of the 911 angel number, you open yourself up to a world of infinite possibilities, where personal growth, spiritual awakening, and the manifestation of your deepest desires become a tangible reality.
Your Galaxy Watch can measure your stress levels using your heart rate and heart rate variability.
You can measure stress manually with your Galaxy Watch or have it continuously measured automatically.
These readings are approximations, and various environmental factors can affect their accuracy.
The readings from the Galaxy Watch are good ballpark estimations, but don’t rely on them over medical advice.
If you own a Galaxy Watch, you probably know that it can supposedly measure your stress levels. But how exactly can a watch on your wrist do that, and can it really do it accurately? The Galaxy Watch can definitely do it, but there are some important caveats to keep in mind about its readings.
How Exactly the Galaxy Watch Measures Your Stress
Technology these days is pretty amazing. Not that long ago, the idea of your watch being able to measure stress levels would have seemed far-fetched. But this is something your Galaxy Watch can do thanks to its possession of a heart rate sensor. Much like a nurse taking your pulse, your Galaxy Watch can measure two important metrics even from your wrist.
Joe Fedewa / How-To Geek
Those metrics are your heart rate and your heart rate variability, or HRV. Your heart rate is how fast your heart is beating, while HRV is the difference in intervals between your heartbeats. Don’t worry too much about the medical jargon: all you need to know is that these two metrics are used by your Galaxy Watch to assess your stress levels.
Your Galaxy Watch will use just these two metrics to provide stress level readings, but can you trust them? There are a few factors to consider.
How Accurate are These Stress Readings?
First and foremost, you must realize that even the best smartwatch can only give you approximations of your stress levels. Furthermore, there are many things that influence how accurate those approximations will be. Firstly, your Galaxy Watch will need to gather data on your typical bodily metrics.
After all, without a baseline to judge your heart rate data against, your Galaxy Watch won’t know what’s normal for you and what isn’t. So, when you first start wearing your Galaxy Watch and getting stress readings, they might not seem very accurate at all. Give them some time, and they’ll start to more accurately represent how you’re feeling.
That said, your watch might not start reading your stress levels at all without your input. You may have to take measurements manually, but you can also set up your watch to take readings automatically. Both are fairly easy to set up.
Using Manual or Automatic Stress Readings
To initiate a manual stress reading on your Galaxy Watch, you’ll need to follow a few simple steps. First, open the Samsung Health app on your Galaxy Watch (or your connected Samsung phone). Then, scroll down until you see the Stress menu and tap on it.
At the bottom of this screen, you’ll see a button labeled “Measure.” Tap this to initiate a measurement from your Galaxy Watch.
Stay still during the measurement. When it’s over, you’ll get a reading on your Galaxy Watch. Tap “Show on Phone” if you want a more detailed report on your primary Samsung device.
With manual readings, you’ll only ever get a report on your stress levels when you want it. The good news is that this will help extend the battery life of your Galaxy Watch since it won’t be doing stress readings on its own. The bad news is that you won’t get very consistent or actionable data on your stress levels like this.
If you want your Galaxy Watch to automatically take periodic stress readings, you’ll need to set that up. Don’t worry, it’s very easy to do. Open the Samsung Health app on your Galaxy Watch (or your connected Samsung phone). Scroll down until you see “Stress” and tap on it.
There should be three small dots on the upper right side of the screen. Tap on that, then select “Advanced Measurement.”
Set your watch to “Measure Continuously.”
With this setting turned on, your Galaxy Watch will measure your stress levels at all times. As mentioned previously, this will be a tad detrimental to your battery life, since the watch will be carrying out this function continuously. However, continuous measurements will also give you a much better understanding of your real stress levels, since you’ll be able to see how it fluctuates all day, every day.
Regardless of whether you use manual or automatic measurements, if you want those measurements to be accurate, there are several factors you should be aware of that could impact accuracy.
Factors That Could Affect The Accuracy of Your Galaxy Watch Stress Measurements
As mentioned earlier, the stress readings provided by your Galaxy Watch are approximations. Stress is determined by a lot more than just your heart rate and HRV, so these readings are never going to be exact. But there’s still a difference between an accurate and an inaccurate approximation. There are some factors that could influence the accuracy of your readings.
Firstly, how snugly does your Galaxy Watch rest against your wrist? If the heart rate sensor doesn’t have good contact with your skin, stress level readings will be affected, so having the right band size is important. How clean the sensor is might have an impact too.
You’ll also need to take physical activity into account. Lots of things get your heart rate up besides stress, so you might get high-stress readings just because you were exercising. Readings taken during physical activity will be less accurate.
Finally, there’s your body temperature. If you feel significantly colder or warmer than your usual body temperature, that could affect stress readings. If the surrounding temperature is significantly different from room temperature, that could have an effect too. How well you can control these factors depends on whether you are doing manual or automatic stress readings.
Obviously, if you’re doing a manual reading, you can ensure that you are in an optimal environment before taking a reading: make sure the temperature is right, that you’re still and sitting down, and that you’ve calmed down after physical activity before taking a reading.
If you’re doing continuous measurements, you won’t be able to control the impact these factors have on your stress readings. Instead, you’ll just need to be aware of them when looking through your reports. If your Galaxy Watch says your stress levels were really high at 9 AM, but that’s when you go for your daily morning run, you can probably write that off as a result of exercise, not high stress.
The Galaxy Watch is no Replacement for Medical Assessment
Ultimately, your Galaxy Watch can give you a fairly good approximation of your stress levels. But it’s not a replacement for professional medical advice. If you feel stressed, but your Galaxy Watch claims you aren’t, don’t believe it over how you feel or what a doctor has to say. A heart rate sensor is a useful aide, but not a substitute for an expert’s judgment!
The Galaxy Watch is undoubtedly an amazing tool with a plethora of useful features. Stress isn’t even the only aspect of your health that it can provide approximate measurements for. As long as you keep in mind that the approximations aren’t the same as a medical diagnosis, you can use your Galaxy Watch to monitor your overall health.
Boeing’s Starliner landed successfully on Saturday
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has completed its journey back to Earth – but the astronauts it was supposed to be carrying remain behind on the International Space Station.
The empty craft travelled in autonomous mode after undocking from the orbiting lab.
The capsule, which suffered technical problems after it launched with Nasa’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, was deemed too risky to take the astronauts home.
They will instead return in a SpaceX Crew Dragon, but not until February – extending an eight-day stay on the ISS to eight months.
After Starliner’s return, a Nasa spokesman said he was pleased at the successful landing but wished it could have gone as originally planned.
The flight back lasted six hours. After it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere parachutes were used to slow its descent at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico on Saturday at 23:01 local time (05:01 GMT).
Nasa said earlier that Butch and Suni were in good spirits and in regular contact with their families.
Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager, said both astronauts were passionate about their jobs.
“They understand the importance now of moving on and… getting the vehicle back safely.”
NASA
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain in space until February 2025
This was the first test flight for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft with astronauts on board.
But it was plagued with problems soon after it blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 5 June.
The capsule experienced leaks of helium, which pushes fuel into the propulsion system, and several of its thrusters did not work properly.
Engineers at Boeing and Nasa spent months trying to understand these technical issues, but in late August the US space agency decided that Starliner was not safe enough to bring the astronauts home.
In a news briefing following the landing, Steve Stich said: “From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us – all of us – that wish it would have been the way we had planned it.
“We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board.”
He added there was “clearly work to do”, and that it would take “a little time” to determine what will come next.
The briefing panel consisted only of Nasa officials. Missing, were two Boeing representatives who were supposed to be present.
When quizzed on the absence, Nasa official Joel Montalbano said Boeing decided to “defer to Nasa” to represent the mission.
Instead, Boeing released a statement “to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing”.
It said Boeing will “review the data and determine the next steps” forward for the programme.
Mr Stich previouslyadmitted there was “tension in the room” between Boeing and Nasa while the decision not to bring the astronauts home on Starliner was being made, with Boeing arguing that their spacecraft could safely return with the pair on board.
“The Nasa team, due to the uncertainty and the modelling, could not get comfortable with that,” he said.
The plan to use rival company SpaceX has brought with it a significant delay to the astronauts’ return.
The extra time is to allow SpaceX to launch its next vehicle, with lift off scheduled for the end of September.
It was supposed to have four astronauts on board, but instead it will travel with two. This leaves room for Butch and Suni to join them in the vehicle to return to Earth at the end of its planned stay next February.
Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station, said that the astronauts were adapting well to their extended mission. Both have previously completed two long-duration stays in space.
She said the pair were undertaking the exercise programmes needed to stay healthy in the weightless environment.
And she added that they now had all of the gear they needed for their unplanned eight-month stay.
“When we first sent them up, they were borrowing a lot of our generic clothing that we have on board, and we have now switched some of those things out,” she said.
She explained that a resupply mission in July had delivered “specific crew preference items” that the pair had requested.
“So they actually have all of the standard expedition gear at this point that any other crew member would be able to select. And we’ve got another cargo vehicle coming up, so we’ll send up anything else that they need for the back-end half of their mission on that flight.”
NASA
Nasa says Suni and Butch have been in good spirits on the space station
The issues with Starliner have no doubt been a blow to Boeing, which is suffering from financial losses as it struggles to repair its reputation following recent in-flight incidents and two fatal accidents five years ago.
After so many problems, a trouble-free landing will be a welcome outcome for the company – and for Nasa.
”We’ll go through a couple months of post-flight analysis,” said Steve Stich.
“There are teams starting to look at what we do to get the vehicle fully certified in the future.”
The US space agency has emphasised its commitment to Boeing’s spacecraft – having two American companies to take astronauts to space has been a key goal for Nasa for some time.
When their space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, the US spent a decade relying solely on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to transport its crew and cargo – a situation Nasa admitted was far from ideal.
So in 2014, Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts to provide commercial space flights for Nasa astronauts – Boeing’s was worth $4.2bn (£3.2bn) while SpaceX received $2.6bn (£2bn).
So far SpaceX has sent nine crewed flights to space for Nasa, as well as some commercial missions, but this was Boeing’s first attempt at a crewed mission.
Boeing’s Starliner had already been delayed for several years because of setbacks in the spacecraft’s development and two previous uncrewed flights in 2019 and 2022 also suffered technical problems.
But Nasa administrator Bill Nelson says he is 100% certain it would fly with a crew onboard again.
Paleontologists have long debated whether pterosaurs could fly. An analysis of fossils from two separate species of the ancient, winged dinosaur relatives suggest that not only did they fly, but also at least one species likely glided on air currents while another probably flapped its wings, according to a report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Researchers determined these different abilities by using CT scans to analyze the fossilized bones. Scanning the humerus of Arambourgiania philadelphiae revealed a series of spiraling ridges inside the hollow bone of the creature with a 30-foot wingspan hollow. That internal bone structure resembles that of the modern vulture, which soars on thermal currents.
Probing the humerus of Inabtanin alarabia, which has a 15-foot wingspan, showed an entirely different structure inside the hollow bone. The scans exposed internal supports resembling the struts of an airplane’s wing, which are also found in the bones of contemporary flapping birds.
Analyzing Fossilized Pterosaur Bones
A confluence of fortune and technology made the findings possible. When Jeff Wilson Mantilla, curator at Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology, and Iyad Zalmout, from the Saudi Geological Survey, found the specimens in 2007 in Jordan, they were amazed at how well-preserved the fossils were, which date back to 66 million years to 72 million years ago. Pterosaur bones are delicate and are often found broken into pieces.
“The majority of pterosaur fossils we have are just completely flat like pancakes,” says Kierstin Rosenbach, who was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at the time of the study.
These two specimens were both found relatively intact. “It is pretty rare to find pterosaurs at all, but to find them preserved in three dimensions is even more rare,” Rosenbach says.
Rosenbach’s involvement represents a confluence of luck and tech. Mantilla, her graduate advisor, had brought the fossils to the university for examination. When Rosenbach joined his group in 2016, paleontologists were just beginning to adopt CT scanning. Rosenbach had used the technology as an undergrad — but on different species. It made perfect sense for her to scan the fossils.
She was initially surprised by the spiral structures inside the A. philadelphiae humerus. Then she started comparing it to bones of many living bird species.
“The only other organism I’ve seen them in is in vultures,” says Rosenbach. “Vultures soar, rather than flap.”
How and why the two different pterosaur species evolved at a similar time and location to have such different bone structures remains a mystery and is up for speculation.
“It could be the environment, it could be foraging style, it could be competition with other similar animals, and it could be simply just a function of their body size and the shape of their wings,” says Rosenbach. “It’s most likely a combination of all of those things.”
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Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
Agriculture’s global environmental impacts are widely expected to continue expanding, driven by population and economic growth and dietary changes. This Review highlights climate change as an additional amplifier of agriculture’s environmental impacts, …
Boeing’s beleaguered space capsule has left the International Space Station without its crew. NASA’s two test pilots stayed behind at the space station as the Starliner capsule undocked Friday and aimed for a touchdown in New Mexico. Its exit follows months of turmoil over its safety. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams should have returned to Earth aboard Starliner in June after a weeklong mission. But their trip to the space station was marred by thruster failures and helium leaks. NASA ultimately decided it was too risky so the astronauts will return next year with SpaceX.
The results of the MarioVGG model—available as a preprint paper published by the crypto-adjacent AI company Virtuals Protocol—still display a lot of apparent glitches, and it’s too slow for anything approaching real-time gameplay. But the results show how even a limited model can infer some impressive physics and gameplay dynamics just from studying a bit of video and input data.
The researchers hope this represents a first step toward “producing and demonstrating a reliable and controllable video game generator” or possibly even “replacing game development and game engines completely using video generation models” in the future.
Watching 737,000 Frames of Mario
To train their model, the MarioVGG researchers (GitHub users erniechew and Brian Lim are listed as contributors) started with a public dataset of Super Mario Bros. gameplay containing 280 ‘levels” worth of input and image data arranged for machine-learning purposes (level 1-1 was removed from the training data so images from it could be used in the evaluation). The more than 737,000 individual frames in that dataset were “preprocessed” into 35-frame chunks so the model could start to learn what the immediate results of various inputs generally looked like.
To “simplify the gameplay situation,” the researchers decided to focus only on two potential inputs in the dataset: “run right” and “run right and jump.” Even this limited movement set presented some difficulties for the machine-learning system, though, since the preprocessor had to look backward for a few frames before a jump to figure out if and when the “run” started. Any jumps that included mid-air adjustments (i.e., the “left” button) also had to be thrown out because “this would introduce noise to the training dataset,” the researchers write.
After preprocessing (and about 48 hours of training on a single RTX 4090 graphics card), the researchers used a standard convolution and denoising process to generate new frames of video from a static starting game image and a text input (either “run” or “jump” in this limited case). While these generated sequences only last for a few frames, the last frame of one sequence can be used as the first of a new sequence, feasibly creating gameplay videos of any length that still show “coherent and consistent gameplay,” according to the researchers.
Super Mario 0.5
Even with all this setup, MarioVGG isn’t exactly generating silky smooth video that’s indistinguishable from a real NES game. For efficiency, the researchers downscale the output frames from the NES’ 256×240 resolution to a much muddier 64×48. They also condense 35 frames’ worth of video time into just seven generated frames that are distributed “at uniform intervals,” creating “gameplay” video that’s much rougher-looking than the real game output.
Despite those limitations, the MarioVGG model still struggles to even approach real-time video generation, at this point. The single RTX 4090 used by the researchers took six whole seconds to generate a six-frame video sequence, representing just over half a second of video, even at an extremely limited frame rate. The researchers admit this is “not practical and friendly for interactive video games” but hope that future optimizations in weight quantization (and perhaps use of more computing resources) could improve this rate.
With those limits in mind, though, MarioVGG can create some passably believable video of Mario running and jumping from a static starting image, akin to Google’s Genie game maker. The model was even able to “learn the physics of the game purely from video frames in the training data without any explicit hard-coded rules,” the researchers write. This includes inferring behaviors like Mario falling when he runs off the edge of a cliff (with believable gravity) and (usually) halting Mario’s forward motion when he’s adjacent to an obstacle, the researchers write.
While MarioVGG was focused on simulating Mario’s movements, the researchers found that the system could effectively hallucinate new obstacles for Mario as the video scrolls through an imagined level. These obstacles “are coherent with the graphical language of the game,” the researchers write, but can’t currently be influenced by user prompts (e.g., put a pit in front of Mario and make him jump over it).
Just Make It Up
Like all probabilistic AI models, though, MarioVGG has a frustrating tendency to sometimes give completely unuseful results. Sometimes that means just ignoring user input prompts (“we observe that the input action text is not obeyed all the time,” the researchers write). Other times, it means hallucinating obvious visual glitches: Mario sometimes lands inside obstacles, runs through obstacles and enemies, flashes different colors, shrinks/grows from frame to frame, or disappears completely for multiple frames before reappearing.
One particularly absurd video shared by the researchers shows Mario falling through the bridge, becoming a Cheep-Cheep, then flying back up through the bridges and transforming into Mario again. That’s the kind of thing we’d expect to see from a Wonder Flower, not an AI video of the original Super Mario Bros.
The researchers surmise that training for longer on “more diverse gameplay data” could help with these significant problems and help their model simulate more than just running and jumping inexorably to the right. Still, MarioVGG stands as a fun proof of concept that even limited training data and algorithms can create some decent starting models of basic games.
Researchers at Stanford University have found that an aqueous solution of a common food color approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, tartrazine, has the effect of reversibly making the skin, muscle, and connective tissues transparent in live rodents.
Illustration of skin tissues rendered transparent following saturation by FD & C Yellow 5, including the paths of photons reflecting off un-dyed tissues. Image credit: Keyi ‘Onyx’ Li / U.S. National Science Foundation.
“We combined the yellow dye, which is a molecule that absorbs most light, especially blue and ultraviolet light, with skin, which is a scattering medium. Individually, these two things block most light from getting through them,” said study first author Dr. Zihao Ou, who, with colleagues, conducted the study while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University before joining the University of Texas at Dallas in August 2024.
“But when we put them together, we were able to achieve transparency of the mouse skin.”
To master the new technique, Dr. Ou and colleagues developed a way to predict how light interacts with dyed biological tissues.
Those predictions required a deep understanding of light scattering, as well as the process of refraction, where light changes speed and bends as it travels from one material into another.
Scattering is the reason we cannot see through our body: fats, fluids within cells, proteins, and other materials each have a different refractive index, a property that dictates how significantly an incoming light wave will bend.
In most tissues, those materials are closely compacted together, so the varied refractive indices cause light to scatter as it passes through. It is the scattering effect that our eyes interpret as opaque, colored, biological materials.
The researchers realized if they wanted to make biological material transparent, they had to find a way to match the different refractive indices so light could travel through unimpeded.
Building upon fundamental insights from the field of optics, the researchers realized dyes that are the most effective at absorbing light can also be highly effective at directing light uniformly through a wide range of refractive indices.
One dye the scientists predicted would be particularly effective was tartrazine, the food dye more commonly known as FD & C Yellow 5.
It turns out, they were correct: when dissolved into water and absorbed into tissues, tartrazine molecules are perfectly structured to match refractive indices and prevent light from scattering, resulting in transparency.
The authors first tested their predictions with thin slices of chicken breast.
As tartrazine concentrations increased, the refractive index of the fluid within the muscle cells rose until it matched the refractive index of the muscle proteins — the slice became transparent.
Then, they gently rubbed a temporary tartrazine solution on mice.
First, they applied the solution to the scalp, rendering the skin transparent to reveal blood vessels crisscrossing the brain.
Next, they applied the solution to the abdomen, which faded within minutes to show contractions of the intestine and movements caused by heartbeats and breathing.
The technique resolved features at the scale of microns, and even enhanced microscope observations.
When the dye was rinsed off, the tissues quickly returned to normal opacity.
The tartrazine did not appear to have long-term effects, and any excess was excreted in waste within 48 hours.
“It’s important that the dye is biocompatible — it’s safe for living organisms,” Dr. Ou said.
“In addition, it’s very inexpensive and efficient; we don’t need very much of it to work.”
The team has not yet tested the process on humans, whose skin is about 10 times thicker than a mouse’s.
“At this time it is not clear what dosage of the dye or delivery method would be necessary to penetrate the entire thickness,” Dr. Ou said.
“In human medicine, we currently have ultrasound to look deeper inside the living body.”
“Many medical diagnosis platforms are very expensive and inaccessible to a broad audience, but platforms based on our tech should not be.”
The study was published this week in the journal Science.
_____
Zihao Ou et al. 2024. Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules. Science 385 (6713); doi: 10.1126/science.adm6869
This article was adapted from original releases by U.S. National Science Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas.
For centuries, a mystery has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of the moon: bright, sinuous swirls that sprawl across thousands of square kilometers of the lunar landscape, visible through telescopes on Earth but defying explanation. Now, at last, scientists are starting to understand them—and it turns out they’re weirder than anyone would have imagined. These enigmatic “lunar swirls” are the result of ancient underground force fields that shield the moon from barrages of subatomic particles blasted out by the sun. Each swirl is a meandering blanket of pristine rock interlaced with darkened, radiation-zapped material.
While most of the moon’s features are sharp and rugged, lunar swirls are instead smooth and wispy, like cirrus clouds painted on the surface. They’re widespread, too; some appear in Mare Marginis (Latin for the “Sea at the Edge,” because from Earth, it appears on the very eastern edge of the moon’s face), while another, Reiner Gamma, lies thousands of kilometers westward. They’re seen both in the smooth, dark lowland maria (Latin for “seas,” which is what they vaguely resemble to the earthbound unaided eye) and in the heavily cratered highlands, suggesting they aren’t associated with any particular feature. As they are brighter than the dark maria—which are plains of dark flooded basaltic lava—lunar swirls are easier to spot in those regions.
Observers realized long ago that the swirls cast no shadows, so they can’t be topographic features like hills or valleys. Instead they resemble what you’d get if clouds collapsed on the surface—although without an appreciable atmosphere, that’s not possible on the moon. And even if such a “cloud collapse” were possible there, more recent observations of the lunar swirls indicate they’re made of the same material as their surroundings—they’re not overlain matter but rather very much a part of the preexisting surface.
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Reiner Gamma is one of the largest and most well-studied lunar swirls; a flattened oval like a staring eye over 100 kilometers wide, with two long wispy tails extending from either end for hundreds more. That makes it big enough to see even in small telescopes, and in fact I’ve seen it with my own! I was amazed at the time that a feature so lovely and conspicuous could still be eluding explanation.
Lunar swirls’ remarkable brightness, it turns out, is a crucial clue to explaining what they are and where they came from. Material on the surface darkens over time as radiation from the sun beats down on it. A rule of thumb is that anything on the moon that’s brighter is younger. For example, look at the brilliant, feathery “rays” of relatively fresh material that is splashed out around giant craters such as Tycho, which formed circa 100 million years ago. That’s practically yesterday in lunar terms because the moon’s surface is billions of years old and essentially static compared with Earth’s!
During the Apollo era, scientists speculated the swirls could be material spewed out by recent volcanism. But maps of the moon’s magnetic field (made using data from Apollo15 and 16) showed that the swirls all coincided with regions of slightly stronger magnetism, indicating a different and more complicated origin. Understanding how this relates to their brightness requires a quick foray into lunar history and the geophysics of magnetic fields.
Unlike Earth, the moon today doesn’t have a global magnetic field. It had a weak one billions of years ago, when it was still molten, but that died down quickly as the moon cooled. As rocks solidified on the surface, however, they were able to retain some of that ephemeral magnetism, creating more enduring localized regions with a somewhat stronger magnetic field. Given their ancient origin, these are called “relic” fields, and many are associated with lunar swirls.
The actual reason for this association became clear about a decade ago, when scientists published results in Nature Communications that showed that the relic fields around swirls, weak as they are, can still be strong enough to slightly deflect the solar wind impinging on the lunar surface. This wind consists of subatomic particles from the sun, and the trajectories of electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons can be changed by magnetic fields. Where the relic fields are stronger, the particles veer off to the side, darkening the ground where they fall—and leaving curiously curlicue patterns in the more pristine magnetically shielded surface.
So surprisingly the lunar rule of thumb of “brighter” meaning “younger” isn’t always true. Sometimes “brighter” instead means something is avoiding the aging effects of cosmic radiation.
I remember reading that research paper with delight, a growing grin on my face. The Star Trek fan in me was overjoyed: lunar swirls exist because our moon had deflector shields—force fields!
You might now wonder: Sure, the swirls are magnetic in nature. But why are they long and sinuous? In 2018 more research showed that the source of the magnetic fields making the swirls must be shallow, less than three kilometers under the surface. This suggests the swirls are tracing buried geological features formed from ancient lunar volcanism: lava tubes, rilles and dikes. Rilles are long, shallow gullies carved by flowing lava. Sometimes, as it cools, the flowing lava makes an overlying roof of solid rock, forming a subsurface lava tube. Some swirls are found near lava tubes: Mare Ingenii (“Sea of Cleverness”) has swirls and pits in the surface that indicate lava tubes beneath. Dikes are geological features where magma intrudes and cools between preexisting layers of rock, creating enormous sheetlike structures.
If the rock in such structures has a relic magnetic field, it can create swirls on the surface. In 2024 a team of scientists published a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets showing that deposits of ilmenite, a mineral common in lunar magma, could enhance the local abundance of elements such as iron and nickel in dikes, amplifying the amount of magnetism there.
While this paints a good overall picture of the swirls and how they formed, unanswered questions remain, of course. Another paper published in the Planetary Science Journal indicates that there is some topographical variation in swirls; on average, the brighter regions of swirls tend to be a few meters lower in elevation than the dark areas. It’s not yet clear why this might be, and in their paper, the scientists note that the ultimate source of the discoloration hasn’t been conclusively determined. Although the solar wind remains a strong candidate, other models propose that the differential coloration comes from material scattered by comets or static-electricity-charged dust grains lofted by tiny micrometeorite impacts, either of which would then be sorted by the moon’s relic magnetic fields.
To me, the real message of the lunar swirls’ complex origin story is quite simple: the moon is literally the closest celestial object to Earth in the entire universe, yet there’s still so much of it we don’t understand. That is a cause for excitement, not dismay. As we explore the moon in more detail—possibly even in person, building on our first forays there more than a half-century ago—we’ll get a chance to solve more of its mysteries, including those that perplex us right out in the open.
Rancho Palos Verdes is already facing setbacks to potential efforts to mitigate the land movement. Last month, the city said it had uncovered an even deeper landslide in the area that is also active. Officials said that movement, at a depth of more than 300 feet, is too fast and too far underground to dig drains and pumps to extract water.
Now that a state of emergency has been declared, Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor John Cruikshank said the money allocated will go toward helping the city government and landslide abatement efforts, but not to individual homeowners.
Homeowners whose power has been shut off will need to come up with tens of thousands of dollars or more to convert to off-grid alternatives, such as solar and battery technologies, Cruikshank told a local CBS affiliate on Wednesday. He hopes the state will help cover such costs.
Residents are already on the hook for damage to their homes, Cruikshank added, since typical home insurance policies don’t cover landslides, hundreds of which are documented in California each year.
Tim Kelly, a mechanical engineer who moved to the Portuguese Bend neighborhood of Rancho Palos Verdes 30 years ago, said he’s relying on his solar panels for power now, and remaining in his home. He attended a public meeting Tuesday in which residents pleaded with city officials for solutions.
“We’re resilient,” Kelly said of the community. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Kelly said that other homes in his area have shifted on their foundations, with some properties cracking and splitting in sections, but his house remains unmoved. He and his neighbors will not abandon their homes and expect government leaders and scientists to figure out how best to “stop the slide,” he added.
Kelly said that, for decades, the local government has failed to install long-term solutions to prevent water from saturating the canyon and divert it into the ocean. Now, the issue is coming to a head for the city and time is of the essence.
“The patient is sick,” Kelly said, “and something must be done to bring it back to life.”
A NASA astronaut at the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday reported hearing a “strange noise” coming from the Boeing Starliner spacecraft just days before it is set to leave the station and return to Earth on autopilot.
The astronaut, Butch Wilmore, radioed Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston to inquire about the noise.
On an audio recording of the exchange, Wilmore holds up a phone to the speakers so that Mission Control could hear the noise he was referring to. A pulsating sound emanating at steady intervals can be heard through Wilmore’s device.
“Butch, that one came through,” Mission Control says after not hearing it the first time. “It was kind of like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.”
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is docked to the Harmony module of the International Space Station on July 3, 2024, as seen from a window on the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft docked to an adjacent port.(NASA via AP)
“I’ll do it one more time and let you all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore tells Mission Control, playing the sound one more time.
Mission Control tells Wilmore the recording will be passed along and that they’ll let him know what they find.
Wilmore clarifies that the sound is emanating from the speaker inside the Starliner.
The bizarre sound was first reported by Ars Technica, which cited a recording first captured and shared by Michigan-based meteorologist Rob Dale.
NASA’s Boeing crew flight test astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are shown inside the International Space Station’s Harmony module and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 13, 2024.(NASA)
Fox News Digital has reached out to Mission Control and Boeing to inquire if the source of the sound has been identified.
Starliner is slated to undock from the ISS, empty, and attempt to return on autopilot with a touchdown in the New Mexico desert.
NASA decided it was too risky to bring back Wilmore and Suni Williams until February. The astronauts were originally slated for a weeklong trip in early June, but the mission has been mired in problems after thruster failures and helium leaks.
Boeing had counted on Starliner’s first crew trip to revive the troubled spacecraft program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had insisted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests in both space and on the ground.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bradford Betz is a Fox News Digital breaking reporter covering crime, political issues, and much more.
