How often does something work as planned and live up to the hype? For most of the world, this is like coming across a unicorn with a few winning lottery tickets. But it pretty much explains the top science story of 2022, the successful deployment and early images from the Webb telescope.
In fact, a lot of good news has come out of the scientific world. There was a constant stream of fascinating discoveries and intriguing potential technologies, with more than 200 individual articles attracting more than 100,000 of his readers, and the topics they covered came from every field. of science. Of course, with the pandemic and climate change going on, not everything we wrote was good news.
For better or worse, Anthony Fauci has become the public face of the pandemic response in the United States. He is trusted by some for his friendly and outspoken advice on how to manage the risk of infection, and has been accused of advocating vaccination (and several conspiracy theories). . So when Fauci himself went on a risk management misstep and contracted SARS-CoV-2, it also made the news and our pandemic expert Beth Moll was there.
The trajectory of his infection turned out to be a metaphor for the pandemic itself. There, all the bright spots seem to be delivered with some additional gray clouds. I took Paxlovid, a drug developed for very rapid scientific research, including. As a result of its design, Paxlovid rapidly and effectively suppresses the SARS-CoV-2 infection that causes his COVID-19.
But even here there are gray clouds. Once the course of treatment is over, many experience recurrence of symptoms for reasons that have not yet resolved. I stopped the medicine.
Neutron stars are perhaps the most extreme objects in the universe (black holes are more like space-time anomalies than celestial bodies themselves). They are where the highest ‘mountains’ are less than a millimeter, and fissures in the crust can trigger violent bursts of radiation. They are also places where the interior is a superfluid of rapidly circulating subatomic particles.
But in a handful of these stars, the conditions are even more extreme, as charged particles within their superfluid interiors create dynamos like the Earth’s core, creating magnetic fields. Except a little stronger. Now, as Paul Sutter details, 1016 Twice as strong. These are magnetars, short-lived states of some neutron stars (they last about 10,000 years, which is short for astronomy).
Given a neutron star’s strong gravity and tendency to spew lethal levels of radiation, there are many ways a neutron star can kill you. But magnetar has an additional trick. They end chemistry. Magnetic fields are so strong that they can distort atomic orbitals that determine how different atoms stick to each other and form chemical bonds. When he gets within 1,000 kilometers of the magnetar, the distortion becomes so severe that the chemical bonds fail. All atoms are free to move around, but this is usually not conducive to life.
This article was a personal reflection by Eric Berger, reflecting changes in NASA and the launch industry since we began covering both NASA and the launch industry nearly 20 years ago. Meanwhile, NASA’s budget has been spent on launching his system in space. Space Launch Systems finally made its maiden flight this year, sending hardware to orbit the moon and back for a perfect water landing.
In the wake of its launch, you might think this work would be focused on its success. and gave smaller companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin a chance to thrive, while existing competitors focused on getting the most out of SLS. Agreement. Berger argues that, without the SLS problem, he might not have built the rover that would ultimately lead NASA to successful human missions.
