Daily Archives: May 14, 2020

San Diego Art Prize finalist finds inspiration in her work for NASA and wont let the pandemics uncertainty stopher

Credit: Michael Andrew

Above: "Gravitational Lensing" by Melissa Walter, created during her artist residency at Bread & Salt in 2017.

Being inspired by the night sky is the stuff of poets or science fiction stories. But San Diego visual artist Melissa Walter isn't just waxing poetic about supernovas and neutron stars. As a long-time science illustrator for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, she knows her stuff.

When Walter first started working for NASA, it was just a job. She didnt have a science background, but stuck with it for fifteen years. I had this really long career working with Chandra, doing their visuals, promotional materials, educational materials, said Walter. She finally decided to shift gears and focus on her own art practice. I honestly was like, okay, I am not gonna deal with supernova and black holes ever again.

Suffice it to say, she spoke too soon.

It wasnt until several years later that she began resuming the connections between her prior work and her art. She remembers working on one piece and realizing it resembled a neutron star, another a supernova. It prompted her to read up on neutron stars again" to get her facts in order, but she still didnt see it as the seed of a new style of art. This was just a one-time thing, she had convinced herself.

But it was the connections to those objects that she had been working with for so many years at NASA that drove her to continue. She kept finding them in her art, and realized that space and its science was a fountain of inspiration.

Walters work is subtle, often inviting a viewer to lean in close. Some are compact, crisp, white sheets of paper cut and layered, and sometimes, the only shape or form is found in the relief or the shadows. Other times, she forms massive installations, showcasing her unmistakable inclination towards white paper, shadows and shapes but serving up splashes of color, film, metal and other materials here and there.

And then theres the science. Each piece, regardless of its galactic origins, brims with a sense of heuristic curiosity and calculation that seems at times at odds with its organic beauty but then again, that brings us back to the poets and their stars again.

Last summer, Walter showed what she described as her most ambitious work yet in Barrio Logans ICE Gallery. "Of All Things" was a large-scale installation work, involving hundreds of small tetrahedrons, cut, folded, glued, shaded and individually affixed directly to the museums walls by Walter and the occasional volunteer shed posted a request for folding buddies on social media early on, vaguely; the unveiling of the finished piece had a long-awaited secrecy that could've toed the line to hype, but instead just seemed to give the San Diego arts community a chance to cheer on one of the scene's biggest cheerleaders, fold-by-fold.

Shes recently shown her work across the globe, including a show in Copenhagen and even her first piece of performance art in a virtual exhibition with Pluto Projects where some works still remain for sale via auction.

Walter has worked from home since 2002 her day job and her art studio so the pandemic hasn't affected her work much. "Being home all the time is not a new thing for me. Im still able to be productive and get stuff done," she said. But one impact is that Walter is one of four official finalists for this year's San Diego Art Prize, and the program was set to launch a special group show of brand new work from each of the four finalists all women at the Athenaeum this month.

Walter had already finished the work she intended to show for the Art Prize. Her new works mark a shift for her: not just studying science, but considering our role in it. "Rather than think specifically on celestial objects or scientific theory, I really started thinking of the morality of space travel."

The shift came from a place of process, too, and represents something much more visceral than any other works she's done in the past. "I think even before we were all sort of locked in, I wasn't feeling comforted anymore by getting my ruler out and trying to be precise and clean and perfect with my work." She's also ruled out the type of gruelling, time-intensive installation work from "Of All Things," for the time being, unless they're commissions.

For the San Diego Art Prize, curator Chi Essary said this week that the exhibition will be rescheduled until the fall, set to open September 3 at Bread & Salt. This year's prize will veer away from the project's historical format, where they paired two emerging artist finalists with established artists for a collaborative residency. This year, all four finalists are emerging artists and each receives a cash prize and group exhibition, culminating in more for the eventual winner.

RELATED: Meet The Women Of The San Diego Art Prize

Whether Walter's already finished, space morality pieces will be what end up in that show remains to be seen. "I'm curious to know myself!" she said.

The uncertainty of COVID-19's impact on the industry also isn't new for Walter. "Being an artist, your life is up in the air all the time, you know? You never really know where the opportunities are gonna come from or if they're gonna work out," she said.

Maybe it's Walter's science side talking, but that uncertainty breeds a pragmatic approach to creating art anyway. "It's part of being creative; we're problem solvers," she said. "We hit a wall and we climb it, or go through it, or build a house out of it. That's what we do."

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I write the weekly KPBS Arts newsletter and edit and produce the KPBS Arts calendar. I am interested in getting San Diegans engaged with the diversity of art and culture made by the creative people who live here.

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Visual Artist Melissa Walter Makes Sense Of The Stars - KPBS

Even though things got as messy as can be expected, the biggest surprise of all was the strange and fascinating ways that Nickelodeon's famous green goo reacted in the absence of gravity.

The results of the experiment could have implications for handling liquids in space, including processing carbon dioxide and wastewater, watering plants grown on the space station and even life support systems on future deep space missions.

Nickelodeon sent about two liters of slime to the space station last summer and Koch, Parmitano and Morgan experimented with it for two hours in the space station's galley, or kitchen.

Koch has childhood memories of watching people get slimed on reruns of "You Can't Do That on Television" on Nickelodeon, but she never imagined she would be testing out the dynamics of slime in space.

While Koch and her fellow astronauts had fun with the slime, they were also surprised by the scientific observations they made during the activities.

"It's not often for your job on the space station that you're given a couple of hours to play with slime, with the ground teams directing you to shoot your friend with slime from a syringe or fill a balloon with slime," Koch told CNN.

"My favorite thing about that experiment is that it highlighted the concept of curiosity leading to discovery. This is discovery-based science. It's why we seek knowledge."

Liquids in space

On Earth, liquids are governed by gravity. But in space and the absence of gravity, bubbles don't rise, droplets don't fall, and liquid doesn't flow the way we're used to observing them on our home turf.

Think about a simple factor of your morning routine, such as pouring a cup of coffee. In space, you can't pour coffee into a cup, and you can't drink coffee from a cup because the coffee wouldn't slide out of the cup and down your throat.

Weislogel has a long history of conducting fluid experiments on the space station. So when Nickelodeon said they wanted to send slime to space, they worked with Weislogel and Rihana Mungin, a Portland State University mechanical engineering graduate research assistant.

Slime is considered a non-Newtonian fluid, which means that its viscosity changes in reaction to different forces.

Viscosity is the thickness of a liquid, defined as the resistance to motion when force is applied. Water is a Newtonian fluid because it follows Newton's law of viscosity, meaning the thickness doesn't change if force is applied.

Compared to water, slime is 20,000 times more viscous, or thicker, because it's a polymer substance that's part solid, part liquid. When the force of gravity is no longer acting on water, surface tension (the force on the surface of a liquid that causes it to act elastically) takes over.

The slime experiment is an example of fluid dynamics, with eight different demonstrations to showcase the properties of slime in the absence of gravity. A set of hydrophobic paddles, or paddles with water-repellent coating, were also sent along with the slime.

"Interestingly, we define liquid on Earth as something that takes the shape of its container," Koch said. "Water just turns into a sphere in microgravity, so we've had to remake definitions of different kinds of matter in space. This experiment is a great demonstration of how microgravity can contribute to our understanding of things on Earth, especially the things we take for granted."

Getting slimy

Slime has never been to the space station, so the astronauts tested it in a variety of ways. And they had fun doing it.

They started by releasing a similar amount of slime and water into the gallery. Both formed floating blobs, which the astronauts then tried to spin. While the wobbly water blob spun continuously unless it was interrupted by the paddle, the slime actually stretched out into a solid-looking oblong shape and rotated. It sprang back to a sphere when the rotation was stopped.

They also used dental floss in an attempt to cut the slime, which didn't work, and pumped air into a slime blob to create a slime bubble.

Parmitano got slimed when Koch shot a jet of slime through a slime blob floating in front of him. Koch was also slimed when a jet of slime was shot at one of the paddles held at an angle and redirected toward her.

Koch expected to be slimed again when slime-filled balloons were popped. The balloons peeled back, but the slime maintained its shape as if it were still cocooned by the balloon. Perhaps the biggest surprise occurred when Parmitano put slime on the paddles. The slime appeared to stick to the paddle despite its water-repllent coating, and he created 3D waves in the slime by moving the paddle up and down.

Then, without being directed to, Parmitano brought two slime-coated paddles together. When he pulled them apart, a long "liquid bridge" of slime formed, then broke into five perfectly placed satellite droplets, Mungin said.

This is something Mungin once saw in Weislogel's class, but on a tiny scale within a thousandth of a second beneath a microscope.

"We were able to see that exact phenomenon with this large and bright liquid in free-floating space," Mungin said.

They hung a shower curtain in the galley to keep slime from getting all over the space station, but it still took them an hour to clean up after the experiments were over. Slime is designed to make a mess and cover everything, but luckily, they could capture the floating blobs.

Fun experiment, big insights

In the footage of the experiments, the researchers could study what they call the viscous limit, a benchmark for liquid analysis. The results of the experiments will be published in journals and used when studying liquids on Earth, as well as designing future experiments for the space station.

Slime acts as an analog for other liquids on the space station because if a droplet is small enough, it will act like slime, Weislogel said. And slime is safe, without posing a risk to the astronauts, so they could handle it in the open cabin, Mungin said.

Future experiments on the space station could involve tabletop experiments, rather than being contained in boxes. Understanding how liquids and droplets behave in the open cabin is key to safely carrying out those experiments.

"When gravity is small, our intuition stalls when it comes to liquids in space," Weislogel said. "Without bubbles rising and droplets falling, most of our fluid systems we design for life on Earth don't work."

And if systems dependent on liquids in space fail, it would be more difficult to fix them the farther out missions travel away from Earth. Experiments on the space station involving liquids are critical to pushing technology ahead.

"We have so much to learn in terms of intuition, to build intuition, because we're so used to making spherical tanks and round tubes," Weislogel said. "In space, that's not the way forward."

Weislogel envisioned pump-less systems where liquid moves based on the shape and size of containers, like fuel depots that can orbit the moon and transfer propellant to a spacecraft without a pump. Watering plants on the space station also requires crew intervention, but Weislogel would love to see a system that can grow plants autonomously.

The space station is unique in that it doesn't focus on one kind of science, but what it can offer is something that other labs can't withholding gravity as a variable, Koch said. And the space environment provides a wide spectrum of discovery, she said.

Experiments on the space station have another power: inspiration, especially for kids.

"It's such a unique experience," Mungin said. "It was pure joy sending slime to space and then getting to come back to it by doing experiments with kids who had the same excitement level as mine. The ultimate science can have such an impact on kids looking to go into STEM."

Especially during this unique time as the pandemic keeps students at home and out of their traditional classrooms, Koch hopes that the slime experiments cause kids to look around their homes and environment and ask new questions and "bring their curiosity" to each thing they encounter.

Koch's curiosity, dreams and hard work led her to become an electrical engineer and an astronaut.

"There's trepidation to dream too big," Koch said. "Even if you're thinking about something that seems too lofty, it isn't out of reach."

Excerpt from:

Astronauts experimented with Nickelodeon's slime in space - CNN

May 11 (UPI) -- British billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group conglomerate, will sell as many as 25 million of his shares in the Virgin Galactic space tourism venture, his company said Monday.

The Virgin Group said it's notified U.S. regulators of the plan, which has been influenced by sagging demand in the leisure, retail and travel industries.

Branson's shares are worth about $500 million and will be sold via Virgin subsidiary Vieco 10 Limited.

Virgin said it "intends to use any proceeds to support its portfolio of global leisure, holiday and travel businesses that have been affected by the unprecedented impact of COVID-19."

Virgin Galactic, unlike Virgin Group's airlines business, has performed well during the health crisis. Its value has nearly double since its October initial public offering from $2.3 billion to $4.3 billion.

Virgin Galactic has been developing space tourism ventures that intended to send passengers in jet-launched spacecraft at a cost of $250,000. Virgin has said it's in the final test stages and has already received more than 600 cash deposits. Branson has said he will go on the first trip, which was scheduled sometime this year.

Virgin Airlines asked the British government in March for up to $616 million in relief aid.

The rest is here:

Virgin Group to sell shares of space venture to aid travel business - UPI News

May 13 (UPI) -- Many sci-fi writers predicted the distant futures of 2001, 2015 or 2019, but 2020 feels like a world those authors never could have imagined, with people stuck in their homes to avoid a pandemic.

The TV drama derived from possible futures, space travel, far-fetched technology or other sci-fi concepts could be a good escape from the mundane realities of the world. Here are some of the sci-fi series available on streaming platforms that have run at least three seasons.

The Expanse - Prime

Three seasons would have been it for The Expanse on Syfy, but Amazon picked up a fourth season and now streams all four. When humans expanded beyond Earth in the future, that only created more drama between people who populated different planets, ships and even the asteroid belt. Amazon is making a fifth season.

The Outer Limits - Hulu and Prime

The original '60s series only lasted two seasons, but the '90s version lasted seven. Both incarnations are on Hulu and Prime. Each Outer Limits was a standalone story with a new cast, and often a twist ending a la The Twilight Zone. Sci-fi subjects could include aliens, science experiments, time travel, the future or other forward-thinking concepts.

12 Monkeys - Hulu

Based on the hit movie, Syfy elaborated the story over four seasons. James Cole (Aaron Stanford) comes from an apocalyptic future to try to find an antidote for the virus that ravaged the world. Dr. Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull) grows to believe them, and they try to work with the erratic Jennifer Goines (Emily Hampshire as a gender-swapped version of Brad Pitt's Jeffrey Goines).

The 100 - Netflix and The CW

In this series, the Earth becomes uninhabitable and a few survivors live on a space station. After a generation of kids grew up in space, their parents sent 100 down to Earth to see if it was possible to restart society. Drama ensued with the 100 kids and tribes who had lived on Earth all along, and with the parents when they returned. The seventh and final season is coming to The CW on May 20.

Black Mirror - Netflix

This British anthology series from Charlie Brooker has an even darker take than The Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. Subjects range from a society in which people live in ad supported cubes, a digital afterlife and a spaceship crew. "Bandersnatch" only could exist on streaming with its interactive options that allow the viewer to choose the outcome. There are five seasons, with no more than six episodes, so it's a shorter total run.

The X-Files - Hulu

For seven seasons, FBI agents Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) investigated possible alien sightings. Scully spent two more years investigating with Agent Doggett (Robert Patrick). After two movies, Scully and Mulder returned for two more short seasons of a revival. All 11 seasons are on Hulu.

Westworld - HBO

Remember that old movie in which Yul Brynner was a cowboy robot who malfunctioned and shot the guests? Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy created a very serious version for HBO. The Old West theme park "hosts" (Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, James Marsden) discovered secrets kept by their creators (Jeffrey Wright, Anthony Hopkins). Guests (Ed Harris, Jimmi Simpson) grew obsessive about the park too. It's still unfolding over three seasons.

Orphan Black - Prime and DirecTV

Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) discovers she's a clone, and keeps meeting new clones as the five seasons continue. Maslany plays every clone distinctly, and they interact thanks to seamless visual effects. It's the Maslany show, but supporting characters like her friend, Felix (Jordan Gavaris), and one clone's husband, Donnie (Kristian Bruun), are memorable, too.

The Twilight Zone - CBS All Access, Hulu, Netflix

Rod Serling created the classic anthology series in 1959 with memorable episodes like "Time Enough At Last," in which one man (Burgess Meredith) hopes to spend the apocalypse reading every book in the library. Or, there's "It's a Good Life," in which adults live in terror of a psychically powered child (Billy Mumy). Netflix has four seasons and Hulu has all five. CBS has all five plus Jordan Peele's modern day reboot.

Star Trek - CBS All Access, Netflix, Prime, Hulu

Gene Roddenberry created the crew of the Starship Enterprise in the 1966 original series, which spun off into many other Star Treks in the '80s, '90s and '00s, and continues with CBS All Access developing even more new series. Trekkers keep exploring new worlds and having new adventures. CBS boasts every Trek series including its exclusives, Discovery and Picard. You also can find the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise on Netflix, Prime and Hulu.

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What to binge next: 10 sci-fi shows to escape into the future - UPI.com

Spied through a normal telescope, the galaxy PKS 201455 is an unremarkable smudge of bright light. But look again in radio wavelengths, and you'll see that the galaxy is hiding a gargantuan, glowing treasure at its center and X marks the spot.

PKS 201455 is an X-shaped radio galaxy (XRG), an unusual type of galaxy that looks like an enormous X in the night sky when imaged in radio wavelengths. The long arms of the X each one about 100 times longer than the Milky Way are actually a blazing-fast soup of particles and magnetic fields, blasted out of the galaxy's central black hole and traveling for millions of light-years into space, far beyond the galaxy's edge.

Big jets of radio energy are common in galaxies with hungry black holes at their centers (even the Milky Way has two "bubbles" of radio energy around its gut). However, most of those jets come in orderly pairs that appear to form a straight line or a round bulge when seen from far away. According to William Cotton, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Virginia who studies XRGs, fewer than 10% of known cosmic radio sources take on a distinct X shape like this one.

Related: The biggest black hole findings of 2019

"You see four things poking out of this galaxy," Cotton, lead author of a new study on the galaxy, told Live Science, "and the question is, how did it get that way?"

Now, Cotton and his colleagues may have an answer. In a new study posted May 7 on the pre-print server arXiv and accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers with the NRAO and South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) used the massive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa's Karoo desert to capture the most detailed image of an XRG ever. The image, shown above, reveals that the strange X bursting out of PKS 201455's center apparently isn't an X at all.

"It's actually a 'double boomerang' shape," Cotton said. "That means something in the galaxy is diverting the flow into these secondary wings."

According to Cotton and the new study, the galaxy's strange shape can be explained by a theory known as the "hydrodynamical backflow model." Here's what's happening, in a nutshell: First, the galaxy's central black hole gobbles up matter for millions of years, until it experiences a bout of cosmic indigestion. The black hole belches twin jets of matter into space, each traveling in opposite directions at incredible speed.

Eventually (tens of thousands of years later), those jets blast through the galaxy's gassy halo, traveling onward into intergalactic space. Pressure slowly builds up in the jets as they travel farther and farther out of the galaxy, ultimately forcing some material in each jet to flip around and flow back toward the center again. This phenomenon is known as "backflow."

Backflow is common in active galaxies, Cotton said, but usually all that returning material bulges up in the middle of the galaxy, rather than bouncing off to the side. In PKS 201455, the galaxy's hot halo of dust and gas is angled in such a way that the backflow is actually "deflected" back out of the galaxy, giving each jet a boomerang-like appearance.

To Cotton and his colleagues, this long cosmic history was evident simply by looking at the contours of the jet flow in the MeerKAT image "We looked at the image for about 10 seconds and just said, 'yeah, that's it,'" Cotton said. But as the team analyzed the brightness of the jets, further details emerged.

According to Cotton, this image shows not one, but three separate black hole burstss separated by tens of millions of years. The two white dots near the picture's center show the most recent event, with twin lobes of energy just beginning to expand out of the black hole and into the galaxy. Beyond these, the two long blue lobes are the decaying remnants of two jets that erupted from the black hole around 10 million years ago, Cotton said.

"And, if you look around the edges of the jets, there's what we call a 'cocoon' the faint remnant of an even earlier outburst," he added. "That's something on the order of 100 million years old."

The fact that all three generations of jets appear to follow the same boomerang pattern suggests that hydrodynamical backflow explains this XRG's shape, rather than some other phenomenon (such as the black hole changing direction between one jet outburst and the next).

The same model may not explain every X-shaped galaxy in the universe each one requires its own analysis, Cotton said. But, at least in the case of PKS 201455, thats one cosmic treasure map solved.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The sky is full of weird X-shaped galaxies. Here's why. - Live Science

AMAZON founder Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in history and could soon become the world's first trillionaire.

But who is the multi-billionaire Amazon founder, how did he start the gigantic tech company and what does he spend his money on?Here's what you need to know...

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Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of online marketplace Amazon.

The businessman studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University before working on Wall Street.

In 1994, Bezos, 56, founded Amazon from a garage - five years later he was named Time magazine's person of the year.

As well as Amazon the tech giant is the founder of Blue Origin, a company working to develop commercial space travel.

He also owns the Washington Post and is a volunteer firefighter.

Bezos is a massive Star Trek fan and had a cameo in the last movie, playing an alien Starfleet official.

Jeff Bezos is estimated to be worth over $140bn (112bn) and is on track to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

While the financial future looks bleak for many during the coronavirus crisis, it has never looked better for Bezos who has become even richer during the pandemic.

Amazon is now worth $1.1trillion with its shares hitting an all time high in April 2020.

It helped Bezos see his fortune grow by another $6.4billion.

Using data from the last five years of the Forbes Rich List, Comparisun worked out that Bezos' annual growth rate will make him a trillionaire in 2026 - when he is 62 years old.

The Amazon founder, who owns about 16 per cent of the business' shares, first featured in the Forbes rich list in 1998.

He became the richest man in history when his net worth reached 78bn ($105.5bn).

It made him the first person to amass a 12-digit fortune since Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has given more than 44billion ($60billion) to charity, achieved the feat back in 1999.

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Bezos wrote down the business plan for Amazon during a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle in 1994.

He initially set up the company in his garage after leaving his job at the hedge fund.

In May 2016, Bezos sold slightly more than one million shares of his holdings in the company for $671million (525million).

On August 4, 2016, he sold one million of his shares at a value of $756.7million (592.4million)

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AMAZON CRIMEHow Saudi Prince 'taunted' Jeff Bezos over affair after 'hacking his phone'

Jeff Bezos married novelist MacKenzie Bezos in 1993 after meeting while working at a New York hedge fund.

They went on to have four children together.

On January 10, 2019, Bezos and wife MacKenzie revealed their 25-year marriage was over in a joint statement.

The divorce between the pair was finalised in April 2019, with Jeff keeping 75 per cent of the couple's stock amounting to about 81billion.

Since splitting, MacKenzie Bezos has stayed away from the limelight, while her former husband has become a fixture in the tabloids with Lauren Sanchez, his new girlfriend.

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What is Jeff Bezos net worth? - The Scottish Sun

Shout it from the space station, The 100 is back.Photo: CWTrailer FrenzyA special place to find the newest trailers for movies and TV shows you're craving.

So, is The 100 becoming Stargate now?

The new trailer for the seventh and final season of The 100 is here and, as with most things, it all starts fairly expectedly. But as the trailer moves on, the show takes a hard right turn into What the Living Hell Land. Take a look for yourself.

Wormholes to other dimensions? Space charts? Snow planets? What the hell happened to the seemingly simple story of humanitys attempt to repopulate the Earth after total Armageddon? Well, things are ending, thats what, and its time for The 100 to try and answer all the questions, even if this latest look seems to be opening up a bunch of new ones. Though to be fair, the more things change, the more they stay the same too. Everyone, especially Clarke, still seems to be fighting the same battles theyve fought since season one.

The seventh and final season begins on the CW on May 20, but if youre not ready to say goodbye to this wild concept just yet, dont forget there may be a prequel on the way.

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The 100 Series Finale Trailer Teases Screams, Space Travel, and Drastic Haircuts - Gizmodo