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Bet the dinosaurs wish they’d thought of this.

NASA on Monday will attempt a feat humanity has never before accomplished: deliberately smacking a spacecraft into an asteroid to slightly deflect its orbit, in a key test of our ability to stop cosmic objects from devastating life on Earth.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spaceship launched from California last November and is fast approaching its target, which it will strike at roughly 14,000 miles per hour (23,000 kph).

For Physics & Chemistry experiments for kids delivered to your door head to https://melscience.com/sBIs/ and use promo code DRBECKY50 for 50% off the first month of any subscription (valid until 22nd October 2022).

To find out whether you can see the partial solar eclipse on 25th October 2022 put in your location here: https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2022-october-25

To watch the next launch attempt for Artemis live at 6pm EST on Tuesday 27th September head to @NASA ‘s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMLD0Lp0JBg.
To watch the DART mission impact live on Monday 26th September 2022 head to @NASA ‘s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RA8Tfa6Sck.
My previous video on the DART mission: https://youtu.be/ZBhTtaTGhao.
My previous video on whether aliens exist (inc. Drake equation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihVzPl7Dys.
My previous Night Sky News debunking these JWST Big Bang Theory claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqfap3v0xxw.
My previous video chatting with Dr. Libby Jones about being in control of JWST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPO8pw8r7ak.
My previous video on the discovery of the star Earendel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChgsXbIgdw.
Welch et al. (2022; Earendel imaged with JWST — not peer reviewed) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.09007.pdf.
Welch et al. (2022; Earendel discovered with HST — behind pay wall) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04449-y.
Carter et al. (2022; JWST direct image exoplanet HIP 65426b — not peer reviewed) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.14990.pdf.
El Baldry et al. (2022; a black hole orbiting a Sun-like star — not peer reviewed) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.06833.pdf.

PDRs4ALL project (that imaged the Orion nebula with JWST) — https://pdrs4all.org/

In a first-of-its-kind test for planetary defense, NASA’s DART spacecraft is scheduled next week to crash into an asteroid and alter the celestial body’s course.

If all goes according to plan, on September 26th at 7:14 pm Eastern Daylight Time, NASA’s DART spacecraft will meet a fiery end. DART, whose name stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is poised to intentionally crash into an asteroid that, at the time of impact, will be 11 million km from Earth. The goal of the mission is to alter the speed and trajectory of the impacted space boulder. The technology developed for the mission could one day aid in shifting the orbit of an asteroid that—unlike this one—is on a collision course with Earth.

“Our DART spacecraft is going to impact an asteroid in humanity’s first attempt to change the motion of a natural celestial body,” said Tom Statler, a scientist in NASA’s planetary defense team, in a recent press conference about the mission. “It will be a truly historic moment for the entire world.”

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three


By Tyler Benster.

Neuroscientists have a dizzying array of methods to listen in on hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain and have even developed tools to manipulate the activity of individual cells. Will this unprecedented access to the brain allow us to finally crack the mystery of how it works? In 2017, Jonas and Kording published a controversial research article, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?” that argues maybe not. To make their point, the authors turn to their “model organism” of choice: a MOS 6502 processor as popularized by the Apple I, Commodore 64, and Atari Video Game System. Jonas and Kording argue that for an electrical engineer, a satisfying description of the processor would break it into modules, like an adder or subtractor, and submodules, like the transistor, to form a hierarchy of information processing. They suggest that, while popular methods from neuroscience might reveal interesting structure in the activity of the brain, researchers often use techniques that would fail to reveal a hierarchy of information processing if applied to the (presumably much simpler) computer processor.

For example, neuroscientists have long used lesions, or turning off or destroying a part of the brain, to try to find links between that brain region and particular behaviors. In one particularly striking experiment, the authors mimicked this classic technique by simulating the processor as it performed one of four “behaviors”: Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pitfall, and Asteroids. They then systematically removed one transistor, and reported which (if any) of the behaviors could still be performed (i.e. did the game boot?) The elimination of 1,565 transistors have no impact, while 1,560 inhibit all behaviors, and indeed a subset of transistors make only one game impossible. Perhaps these are the Donkey Kong transistors, the authors coyly suggest, before concluding that the “causal relationship” is highly superficial.

The findings could revolutionize how we study potential collisions.

Asteroids pass by our planet all the time and even sometimes land here, causing much devastation. Understanding how often these kinds of impacts happened in the past and how they influenced the environment both then and today is crucial to protecting Earth.

Now, new research published by the Estonian Research Council on Friday has shown that analyzing bodies of organisms killed by an impact of asteroids can teach us how much damage occurs at the spot of such a cosmic collision.

Researchers dugout trenches in rims of four craters (Kaali Main and Kaali 2/8 in Estonia, Morasko in Poland, and Whitecourt in Canada) located on two different continents that formed thousands of years apart to analyze their content and draw conclusions about the effects of the collisions on our planet.

Shockwaves caused by asteroids colliding with Earth create materials with a range of complex carbon structures, which could be used for advancing future engineering applications, according to an international study led by UCL and Hungarian scientists.

Published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of researchers has found that formed during a high-energy shock wave from an around 50,000 years ago have unique and exceptional properties, caused by the short-term high temperatures and extreme pressure.

The researchers say that these structures can be targeted for advanced mechanical and electronic applications, giving us the ability to design materials that are not only ultra-hard but also malleable with tunable electronic properties.

The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future.

German animation and design studio, Kurzgesagt, explores the far future of humanity and how our population may change over the aeons.

Given the numerous global threats we face during this century and beyond – from climate change to nuclear war, asteroid impacts and killer viruses – many of us are concerned that humans could go extinct. But there are reasons to be optimistic, according to this latest video from Kurzgesagt. Rather than approaching the end of human history, we may actually be living at the dawn of our species; the mere prelude for a vast and exciting future that lies ahead.