Delta_V

...Trump also suggested during the high-level meeting with Xi Jinping that the US, China and Russia should join forces to challenge the International Criminal Court, noting that their interests align.

The question of why the U.S. government began a war with Iran is unsettled. The ostensible reasons, blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons and protecting Iranians’ human rights, are not enough. Iran’s agreement not to build a nuclear arms program was in force...

...a U.S. government that so easily tolerates human rights abuses within the United States and in certain allied nations would seemingly have little zeal to fight Iran on that account, unless there were other inducements.

Strategic considerations as to U.S. economic sustainability and U.S. economic and political power in the world very likely impelled nervous U.S. decision-makers to start a war...

...The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz might not be a strategic “mistake,” but rather a deliberate feature of the conflict...

...The argument is that the blockade of the straits is a deliberate move by Washington to choke off China’s energy “lifeline” and, in doing so, halt its geopolitical rise...

...“Because oil was and is so fundamental to nearly every industry, the ‘petrodollar’ became ubiquitous, and the dollar became the cornerstone of the global economy.” To preserve the petrodollar arrangement and predictability of the dollar’s value becomes a principal objective of this war...

...Star Catcher says its customer base spans commercial space operators and U.S. Government stakeholders...

...If Star Catcher can prove the system works in orbit, satellite operators may no longer have to treat the power budget they launched with as the ceiling on what a spacecraft can do...

...its first space-based optical power-beaming demonstration is planned for later this year...

...In its announcement, Star Catcher said its Series A would fund deeper engagement with U.S. national security customers...

...“Persistent surveillance, resilient communications, and unhindered maneuverability are all constrained today by power,”...

...Beam pointing has to be precise across long distances. Beam intensity must be controlled so the system does not damage the solar arrays it is meant to help...

...Ford Energy is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. We will provide United States-assembled battery energy storage systems (BESS) for utilities, data centers and large industrial and commercial customers in the United States...

Our flagship product – the Ford Energy DC block – is a standardized 20-foot containerized battery energy storage system designed around 512 Ah LFP prismatic cells. We offer two configurations: the FE-250 (two-hour system) and the FE-450 (a four-hour system). Both integrate advanced LFP prismatic battery technology, liquid-cooled thermal management and battery management system.

...We are repurposing existing U. S. battery manufacturing capacity in Glendale, Kentucky...

...Research published in the journal Nature Astronomy shows how WOH G64, a giant binary star system in the Large Magellanic Cloud, has recently undergone a striking transformation...

...researchers say they've examined more than 30 years of brightness measurements and found that the star, long classified as a cold, red supergiant, has become markedly hotter – by over 1,000°C – and now appears yellow rather than red...

On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity’s first interstellar explorer going.

...The instrument has provided critical data about the structure of the interstellar medium, detecting pressure fronts and regions of varying particle density in the space beyond our heliosphere. The twin Voyagers are the only spacecraft that are far enough from Earth to provide this information.

...“Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored...

Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.

...The reason physicists have been skeptical about wormholes comes down to a problem with energy. To hold the throat of a wormhole open, you would need something called exotic matter. In physics, ordinary matter (stars, gas, you, your coffee) always has a positive energy density which corresponds to positive mass. Exotic matter would have negative energy density, essentially “negative mass.” We have never observed anything like that in nature. Most wormhole solutions that physicists have found over the decades require this exotic matter to exist, which is why wormholes have stayed firmly in the category of “mathematically possible but physically unlikely.” Today’s paper offers a way around this problem.

Instead of trying to prop open a wormhole with exotic matter, the authors add two extra physical fields to Einstein’s equations alongside gravity. The first is an electromagnetic field, the same electric and magnetic fields you encounter in introductory physics. This wormhole carries both electric and magnetic charge. The second is something called a dilaton...

Why should we care about the dilaton? Because it is not something the authors invented for convenience. It shows up naturally in several theories that physicists take seriously as candidates for deeper laws of nature. Superstring theory, which attempts to unify all fundamental forces, predicts a dilaton. So does Kaluza-Klein theory, which tries to explain electromagnetism as a consequence of a hidden extra dimension of space. And Brans-Dicke theory includes one too. If any of these theories are correct, the dilaton exists, and the kind of wormhole described in this paper becomes a natural prediction of Einstein’s equations...

A bewilderingly powerful mystery object found in a nearby galaxy and only visible so far in millimeter radio wavelengths could be a brand new astrophysical object unlike anything astronomers have seen before...

...What we do know about Punctum is that based on how strongly polarized its millimeter light is, it must possess a highly structured magnetic field. And so, Shablovinskaia believes what we are seeing from Punctum is synchrotron radiation. Objects with strong polarization tend to be compact objects, because larger objects have messy magnetic fields that wash out any polarization.

Perhaps that synchrotron radiation is being powered by a magnetar, the team believes, which is a highly magnetic pulsar. However, while a magnetar's ordered magnetic field fits the bill, magnetars (and regular pulsars for that matter) are much fainter at millimeter wavelengths than Punctum is.

Supernova remnants such as the Crab Nebula, which is the messy innards blasted into space of a star that exploded in 1054AD, are bright at millimeter wavelengths. The trouble is that supernova remnants are quite large — the Crab Nebula itself is about 11 light-years across — whereas Punctum is clearly a much smaller, compact object...

Researchers at European XFEL in Germany have tracked in real time the movement of individual atoms during a chemical reaction in the gas phase. Using extremely short X-ray flashes, they were able to observe the formation of an iodine molecule (I₂) after irradiating diiodomethane (CH₂I₂) molecules by infrared light, which involves breaking two bonds and forming a new one.

At the same time, they were able to distinguish this reaction from two other reaction pathways, namely the separation of a single iodine atom from the diiodomethane, or the excitation of bending vibrations in the bound molecule. The results, published in Nature Communications, provide new insights into fundamental reaction mechanisms that have so far been very difficult to distinguish experimentally.

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