The James Webb Space Telescope has taken a long and sometimes painful journey from its initial conception to its final arrival at Lagrange point L2 and subsequent commissioning. Things rarely went well for the telescope, except for buttery-smooth launch and deployment sequences, which faced nearly every conceivable bureaucratic, scientific, and engineering outcry during its development. But now it's time to see what this thing can do - approx. NASA has announced that July 12 will be "Image Release Day". Which would serve as the public debut of the web. Relative radio silence from NASA on Webb mirror alignment completed - except Recent micrometeoroid collisionThat, of course — suggests that the space agency has been busy with "first light" projects. So there's good reason to expect that the images first released from the web will be great. images will shrink 10:30am EDTSo mark your calendars and prepare to be happy. hopefully.
Obviously, sitting in the middle of the ocean on a boat, even one built like a luxury hotel, can be very boring. This is the silent admission of cruise line operator Royal Caribbean, who are actually Starlink interested in getting satellite service on its fleet of cruise liners, So much so that they are partnering with Starlink and petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to expedite the process of approving Starlink for use on moving vehicles. The FCC currently forbids using that case, which we find a bit surprising given that terrestrial Starlink customers should be able to pay an upcharge for "RV Mode," which lets them move their terminals. There's a fine line between using the service at several stops along the route and using it while in motion, so maybe Royal Caribbean gets their wish. Personally, adding internet connectivity seems like the last thing that would really tempt us on a cruise liner, but hey — whatever floats your boat.
So you've managed to buy a new car—a neat trick considering the tumbleweed-strewn wasteland most cars these days are very similar to—and you've somehow managed to fill up the gas tank. Succeeded. What's next in the journey to the poor house? Why not sport a digital license plate On your new ride for just $25 extra a month? This plate making company, reviver, says their proposals have been approved for vehicles registered in California, Arizona and now Michigan, and are legal for use across all state lines. They appear to be based on e-ink technology, which means you get a monochrome rendering of the state's license plate – which Arizona's Standard Plate It's a bit of a shame. Reviver claims there are all kinds of benefits to paying a monthly subscription fee to have one of their plates, such as GPS-enabled telematics to track down a stolen vehicle. We would say that the plate is more likely to be stolen, and unless we encourage it, we wait for the inevitable turbulence as these things hit the secondary market.
We're skeptical about the future of electric airplanes, based primarily on the skepticism that battery technology will ever reach the power-to-weight ratio that would make something like an electric passenger jet practical. but see this video We might have to reconsider that position. The aircraft is built by Lilium, and shows the Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft making its first in-flight transition. The seven-passenger aircraft, which sports 36 electric-ducted fans in the movable flaps on the rear edge of its wings and forward canards, flew vertically but then smoothly forwards with the lift generated by its wings. transitions to. It is quite graceful, and the plane itself is beautiful. The company claims that it will take a full 175 km of passengers using its VTOL capabilities, or a little further if it can land without using vector thrust. Such an electric aircraft could make "Uber Air" technically feasible, and it could have a huge impact on regional passenger travel and air freight.
And finally, our friend Alberto Caballero sent word of pre-print of a paper He's working on that, depending on how you look at things, it could just serve as nightmare fuel. Titled "Estimates of the spread of malicious extraterrestrial civilizations", the paper aims to assess the relative risk of active SETI efforts, which seek to "reach out and touch someone" in the galaxy. Given that 100% of the known civilizations in the Milky Way are clearly malevolent, and at least occasionally, it seems likely to declare themselves to be galactic mean children too high. but Alberto, an astronomer who led habitable exoplanet hunting project And hack came on chat Some time ago, calculations that being invaded by malicious aliens are about 100 times less likely than Earth to be hit by a Chicxulub-grade impactor. Oh! The details behind that conclusion are interesting, and it's worth reading the paper to see how he reached that conclusion.
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