Tag Archives: strange

There’s Something Very Strange About Our Galaxy

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Researchers have found that there's something highly unusual about the Milky Way, setting it apart from other galaxies.

Galactic Outlier

Researchers have found that there's something highly unusual about the Milky Way that sets it apart from galaxies which, on a surface level, appear similar.

As detailed in three recent papers published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers examined a mountain of data as part of the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) survey, which was dedicated to comparing the Milky Way to 101 other galaxies that are similar in mass.

The distinction is technical but significant, the researchers say: they found that the Milky Way has surprisingly few smaller satellite galaxies compared to its peers — and some of them have mysteriously stopped forming new stars.

"Now we have a puzzle," said Stanford astrophysics professor Risa Wechsler, who cofounded SAGA and coauthored all three papers, in a statement. "What in the Milky Way caused these small, lower-mass satellites to have their star formation quenched?"

Satellite Activity

The findings suggest our galaxy's evolutionary history is strikingly different, setting it apart from all the others — research that could also force scientists to reexamine how we understand the formation of galaxies.

"Our results show that we cannot constrain models of galaxy formation just to the Milky Way," said Wechsler. "We have to look at that full distribution of similar galaxies across the universe."

At the core of the researchers' findings is dark matter, the mysterious substance that scientists believe makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, but has yet to be directly observed. Researchers have previously found that massive halos of dark matter allow galaxies to form within them, creating gravitational forces strong enough for ordinary matter to clump together.

"Perhaps, unlike a typical host galaxy, the Milky Way has a unique combination of older satellites that have ceased star formation and newer, active ones... that only recently fell into the Milky Way's dark matter halo," Wechsler suggested.

When Wechsler and her colleagues examined 378 small satellite galaxies that orbit the 101 much larger galaxies like the Milky Way, they found that half the Milky Way's satellites were no longer forming stars, unlike most other galaxies, whose satellites were still active stellar factories.

It all raises an intriguing question: why is our galactic home different?

"To me, the frontier is figuring out what dark matter is doing on scales smaller than the Milky Way, like with the smaller dark matter halos that surround these little satellites," Wechsler said.

More on galaxy formation: This Ancient "Rebel" Galaxy Closely Mirroring the Milky Way Has Astronomers Freaked Out

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There's Something Very Strange About Our Galaxy

Mark Zuckerberg Shows Off Bizarre Video of Himself Leg Pressing Chicken Nuggets

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AI might be worsening carbon emissions, but at least we have this fake video of Mark Zuckerberg leg-pressing chicken nuggets, we guess.

Combo Meal

Meta-formerly-Facebook announced a new suite of AI-powered video-creating and editing tools today, collectively called "Meta Movie Gen."

Longtime CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the new AI offering in his favorite way to promote anything: by showing off his love for fitness — albeit with some very strange, very AI twists.

In a bizarre Instagram video, Zuck can be seen doing leg presses in a series of increasingly strange AI-generated settings. In the first scene, he's pictured using the machine in a neon-lit gym; in the next, he's dressed like Caeser and pictured against a distinctly ancient Roman backdrop. At one point he's pressing dripping racks of gold.

Then, in perhaps the strange scene of all, Zuck is suddenly pictured leg-pressing a large bucket of chicken nuggets whilst surrounded by a sea of french fries.

"Every day is leg day with Meta's new MovieGen AI model that can create and edit videos," Zuck captioned the video. "Coming to Instagram next year."

Sure! Why not. Generative AI might be guzzling energy and drastically worsening carbon emissions in the process, but we get... a fake billionaire nugget press. Will somebody please make it make sense?

Mixed Reactions

The top comments on the video were overwhelmingly positive.

"Whoa!" wrote one impressed Instagram user. "That's exciting!!"

But other Instagram users were more skeptical.

"Second richest man in the world spending his [research & development] money on this," commented one user, seemingly incredulous of Meta's resource allocation.

"How many artists did you steal from to train your AI?" asked another netizen. A fair question, given that Zuck recently drew criticism for declaring that "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content."

Looking Ahead

In a press release, Meta characterized Movie Gen as an "advanced and immersive storytelling suite of models" with "four capabilities: video generation, personalized video generation, precise video editing, and audio generation."

But the chicken nugget promo aside, there's no set release date for the tool.

"We aren't ready to release this as a product anytime soon," Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox wrote in a Threads post, "but we wanted to share where we are since the results are getting quite impressive."

Or, alternatively, Meta wants its shareholders to know that a competitor to OpenAI's Sora model is in the works — and that Zuck can leg press copious amounts of chicken nuggets.

More on Mark Zuckerberg: Zuckerberg Says It's Fine to Train AI on Your Data Because It Probably Has No Value Anyway

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Mark Zuckerberg Shows Off Bizarre Video of Himself Leg Pressing Chicken Nuggets

Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim

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Electric discharges underground cause gold atoms to accumulate, which eventually forms gold nuggets, the researchers suggest.

Spark of Gold

Electric currents in the Earth may be responsible for the formation of gold nuggets, new research suggests.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the theory could explain why large chunks of gold — sometimes weighing more than a hundred pounds — appear in quartz veins when there's seemingly little traces of the metal in the surrounding earth.

"The standard explanation is that gold precipitates from hot, water-rich fluids as they flow through cracks in the earth's crust. As these fluids cool or undergo chemical changes, gold separates out and becomes trapped in quartz veins," study lead author Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia, told Forbes. "While this theory is widely accepted, it doesn't fully explain the formation of large gold nuggets, especially considering that the concentration of gold in these fluids is extremely low."

Main Squeeze

The answer lies in the unremarkable but ubiquitous mineral that gold nuggets are found in: quartz.

Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, which means they can generate an electric charge when put under mechanical stress, like getting squeezed. Being underground, they're potentially subjected to these forces from every direction.

The most formidable stress inducers, though, would be earthquakes, of which hundreds occur each day.

The researchers hypothesized that the regular application of such tectonic forces could generate electricity in quartz veins strong enough to pull gold out of the fluids in the earth's crust. Over time, this accumulates to form full-blown nuggets.

"Quartz is the only abundant piezoelectric mineral on Earth, and the cyclical nature of earthquake activity that drives orogenic gold deposit formation means that quartz crystals in veins will experience thousands of episodes of deviatoric stress," the researchers wrote in the study.

Pay Dirt

To test the theory, the researchers placed quartz crystals in a water solution containing dissolved gold, which they subjected to earthquake-like stresses. As they predicted, the quartz generated enough voltage that gold nanoparticles accumulated on top of the crystals.

"In essence, the quartz acts like a natural battery, with gold as the electrode, slowly accumulating more gold with each seismic event," Voisey told Forbes. "Our discovery provides a plausible explanation for the formation of large gold nuggets in quartz veins."

Other scientists in the field have been intrigued by these findings.

"The piezoelectric theory is interesting because it would help to further concentrate any nanoparticles, but also explain why early quartz veins in fault zones are typically barren: you need the quartz veins to be there before you can induce the piezoelectrical effect," Taija Torvela, a geologist at the Univeristy of Leeds, UK, who wasn't involved in the study, told The Guardian.

Taija suggests that understanding this effect could be used to target gold deposits — though to be practical, "we would need to know if there are any markers, detectable on Earth’s surface, that this process would leave behind."

More on current events: Scientists Say They've Detected a Strange Source of Electricity at the Bottom of the Ocean

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Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim

NASA Engineers Were Disturbed by What Happened When They Tested Starliner’s Thrusters

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Later this week, Boeing's plagued Starliner is set to attempt its return journey from the International Space Station.

But instead of ferrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to the ground, it'll be undocking and reentering without any crew on board — after a software update, that is, because it was originally unable to fly without astronauts inside it.

Even before the ill-fated capsule launched in early June, engineers noticed several helium leaks. During Starliner's docking procedures, the leaks quickly turned into a real problem. The spacecraft missed its first attempt to dock with the space station.

Ever since, Boeing and NASA engineers have been struggling to identify the root cause of the problem.

At first, NASA remained adamant that it was simply a matter of routine procedure to investigate the mishap before imminently returning Wilmore and Williams on board Starliner. The agency repeatedly fought off reports that the two astronauts were "stranded" in space, arguing that engineers just needed a little more time to figure out the issue.

But it didn't take long for NASA to change its tune. While attempting to duplicate the issue at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, engineers eventually found what appeared to be the smoking gun, as SpaceNews' Jeff Foust details in a detailed new breakdown of the timeline.

A Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer — a disturbing finding, because it greatly degraded the thrusters' performance.

Worse, without being able to perfectly replicate and analyze the issue in the near vacuum of space, engineers weren't entirely sure how the issue was actually playing out in orbit.

During a late August press conference announcing its decision to send Starliner back empty, NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich admitted that "there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters."

"People really want to understand the physics of what's going on relative to the physics of the Teflon, what's causing it to heat up and what's causing it to contract," he admitted. "That's really what the team is off trying to understand. I think the NASA community in general would like to understand a little bit more of the root cause."

While engineers found that the thrusters had returned to a more regular shape after being fired in space, they were worried that similar deformations might take place during prolonged de-orbit firings.

A lot was on the line. Without perfect control over the thrusters, NASA became worried that the spacecraft could careen out of control.

"For me, one of the really important factors is that we just don’t know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem," NASA associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox said, as quoted by SpaceNews.

"If we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action," Stich said during last month's teleconference. "But when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures with a crew on board... it was just too much risk."

That's a polite way of saying that NASA had very serious concerns. According to Faust's reporting, the saga evolved into "NASA’s biggest human spaceflight safety crisis since the shuttle Columbia accident more than two decades ago."

Earlier this week, NASA announced that Starliner's uncrewed undocking will take place as soon as Friday evening.

Wilmore and Williams will stay behind, presumably watching as their ride to space departs without them.

The two astronauts will have to be patient as their ersatz shuttle, SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, won't arrive until no sooner than September 24. Even then, the pair will have to wait until the Crew Dragon spacecraft returns to Earth in February, extending what was supposed to be an eight-day mission into an eight-month affair.

More on Starliner: Astronauts Hear Strange Sounds Coming From Boeing's Cursed Starliner

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