Delta_V

Images from EarthCam showed numbers on the lawn since at least Wednesday afternoon, with the number eight appearing most clearly as browned grass. It's not clear what caused the grass to brown.

A little over a year ago, Sen. Tim Sheehy floated an audacious proposal to reshape the way the federal government fights wildfires. It called for expanding the use of private planes and helicopters to quickly attack blazes while also eliminating the U.S. Forest Service’s rigorous airworthiness inspections for those aircraft.

The idea stood to benefit Sheehy, a Montana Republican, personally. Before running for Congress, he founded and ran an aerial firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace, which is known for its scoopers, aircraft built to retrieve water from lakes or oceans and drop it onto fires. Since 2021, the Forest Service has paid Bridger more than $235 million for use of its scoopers, according to public records.

Sheehy’s ownership of Bridger is well known, but what hasn’t been reported is that the same month the proposal leaked, a Forest Service inspector had discovered a crack in a wing of an aircraft Bridger had presented as ready for service. The scooper had failed the very inspection Sheehy sought to eliminate...

“Very seldom do you find a crack in a major component,” said Paul Markowitz, a former national aviation maintenance manager for the Forest Service. Detecting such problems is the reason the Forest Service operates an airworthiness program, he added: “It’s to keep people alive.”...

...“Why can’t we be inspecting ourselves?”...

Since 2010, when the Forest Service implemented its current airworthiness program, the accident rate for aircraft it owns or contracts has plummeted. Between 1993 and 2010, it reported 85 accidents that killed 63 people — an average of nearly four deaths per year. Between 2011 and 2023, the last year for which data is available, the agency reported just 17 accidents and seven fatalities...

...In January 2024, Bridger presented its first scooper as ready for service, only to have a Forest Service inspector find issues with the engine and electronics...

In early April 2025, Bridger presented two scoopers for carding, saying they were ready for service. During one of these assessments, a Forest Service inspector found a crack in a wing...

Former Biden administration official Shuwanza Goff is joining Paramount Skydance as VP of U.S. government affairs...

Goff will be tasked with helping shape the company’s public policy and government affairs strategy, including engagement with federal and state policymakers and industry partners. She was previously a partner and chief strategy officer at lobbying firm Empire Consulting Group.

Goff served as the director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs from 2023 to 2025 in the Biden administration. In that role, she drove the White House’s policy agenda and was the steward of key bipartisan relationships on Capitol Hill...

...New research examines the issue. It's titled "The Life and Death of Stars That Capture Primordial Black Holes," and it's available at arxiv.org...

...When a star captures a PBH, the PBH finds its way to the stellar core. Once there, it accretes material from the star's interior, having a dramatic effect on the star's evolution. "The resulting object, a “Hawking star”...

There are two diverging paths post engulfment, and both are terminal...

It's all about disk formation, which is governed largely by angular momentum. Above a certain threshold, accretion is rapid, and powerful feedback destroys the star. If accretion is slow and steady, the Hawking star can survive...

The quiet terminal branch potentially produces gravitational waves (GWs). While the explosive branch leaves behind a low-mass, rapidly spinning BH..."Any future GW detection of a compact binary containing a subsolar or otherwise anomalous low-mass BH would be a striking signature of nonstandard compact-object formation."

The remnants from both branches are valuable probes of PBH. "Their rates, environments, and electromagnetic signatures could constrain the PBH contribution to dark matter," write the authors...

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has verified the core plasma physics assumptions for its upcoming ARC fusion power plant following a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Plasma Physics.

The research confirms the ARC reactor design aligns with known physics, allowing the company to shift its focus toward detailed hardware engineering...

According to the validated models, the ARC plant will produce approximately 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of fusion power to generate 400 megawatts (MW) of net electricity for the grid...

CFS engineers are using this simulation framework to optimize upcoming design iterations, adjusting dimensions like tokamak width and divertor length to refine reactor performance before manufacturing begins.

...the two black holes orbit one another every 121 days. Their separation is roughly 250 to 540 times the Earth-Sun distance...

...In the new study, the researchers also found signs in the same set of samples of an extended fungal bloom tens of thousands of years before the asteroid impact. This coincides with intense volcanic activity in what is now India and supports the idea that volcanism was a factor in the mass extinctions in that period.

Fungal surges are presumably due to the availability of dead plants and animals as food sources following disasters and disruptions...

“If you ask most people what killed the dinosaurs, they’ll say it was that asteroid, but our fungal microfossil-based results suggest that the world already had been undergoing a cataclysm when the asteroid struck,”...

...The key to the new system is a special propellant that can power both chemical and electrical thrusters...

...a type of “green monopropellant” originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in chemical propulsion in space can also effectively power tiny “electrospray” thrusters. Electrospray thrusters are dime-sized rockets that use electric fields to charge up a liquid propellant’s particles, which are then shot into space as a thrust-generating spray...

The Justice Department’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, which would pay out public money in compensation for alleged overreach in federal prosecutions, including for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been accurately described as one of the most nakedly corrupt actions in American history. It would give a tacit endorsement from every American taxpayer to the notion that the Capitol Riot’s only transgression, for example, came from those who tried to punish its perpetrators for attempting to halt the outcome of an election...

...if a judge can be convinced that this fund, established with no transparency and no congressional or judicial oversight, which emerged from a lawsuit between a sitting president and his own government, and is arguably contrary to the purpose of the Judgment Fund from which it derives authority, is an unconstitutional scheme to defraud the government by its very structure, then anyone can sue to recoup the money, and then some, under the False Claims Act of 1863...

...Anyone found guilty of a false claim must not only pay back the ill-gotten funds, but three times the amount in damages. That means that anti-weaponization fund recipients would risk having to pay much more back in the future, while going through years of litigation. Debts incurred by FCA violations are not even dischargeable in bankruptcy...

...That something has been named Phoebe. And working out what it actually is turns out to be one of the most intriguing puzzles in modern astronomy. The phenomenon at the heart of the story is called gravitational microlensing and it’s one of the most elegant predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity. When a massive compact object passes between us and a distant star, its gravity acts like a lens, briefly magnifying the star's light in a very characteristic way. The shape of the brightening is distinctive and entirely unlike anything produced by a variable star, a flare, or an asteroid...

The team calculated the probability of the lensing object belonging to each possible population — Milky Way stars, Large Magellanic Cloud stars, or the dark matter halo between and around them. The dark matter halo wins by a factor of 100,000. Phoebe is five orders of magnitude more likely to be a dark matter object than anything associated with normal stellar matter...

Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress and four other members of the House of Representatives have asked the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General to investigate why a federal probe into a prison drugs-for-votes scheme was abandoned after the 2024 elections...

Their request follows a ProPublica investigation that published earlier this month detailing how prosecutors had uncovered a drugs-for-votes scheme being run by a violent gang in Puerto Rican prisons and were deep into looking at whether now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón or her campaign were involved. In the days following President Donald Trump’s election in 2024, as prosecutors prepared the indictment, they were told by supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico to exclude the voting-related charges against inmates and prison staff, four sources with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. Then, once Trump took office, they were told to abandon the probe into potential political ties entirely, the sources said.

In their letter, the members of Congress urged the inspector general to examine the Justice Department’s decision to not pursue charges related to election fraud “despite reported findings and evidence.” They added that the failure to further investigate contradicts the Trump administration’s “repeated emphasis on prioritizing election integrity and election security as federal enforcement priorities,” in addition to deeming drug traffickers threats to public safety and democratic institutions...

...While conventional LED‑based visible light communication (VLC) systems typically operate over only a few meters, the novel photonic engine can move data over 1.2 kilometers...

...“This work also provides compelling experimental support for the application of laser lighting in scenarios such as drone logistics and low‑altitude air travel,” said Xia...

...Scientists revealed that previously researchers have faced barriers to developing 6G technology, including the need for ultra-dense base stations with high energy and infrastructure costs, as well as challenges in combining high-performance lighting materials and high-speed photodetectors into compact devices that can be mass-produced at low cost...

...6G networks built into future smartphones and other objects such as streetlamps would not only allow information to move through networks an order of magnitude faster–they would be able to “see,” “hear,” and “think,” detecting people and objects and their subtle movements...