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Submission + - For Sale: 1990 Airstream NASA 025 Command Vehicle (hemmings.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Imagine pulling into Burning Man driving this?

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to own your own NASA vehicle this is the NASA 025 command vehicle. NASA 025 was designed to land crewed missions at Edwards Air Force Base. It is the one and only of its kind ever built. Has only 8240 miles on it as driven from Ohio to California then around the Edwards base

As Edwards AFB is a massive dry lake bed space missions (both public and secret) would often land in remote areas of the base miles from the tower. This vehicle would be the onsite command center complete with communications and atmospheric monitoring.

Comment USSR Spying on American Embassy using light (Score 1) 2

From Wikipedia:
"The technique of using a light beam to remotely record sound probably originated with Léon Theremin in the Soviet Union at or before 1947, when he developed and used the Buran eavesdropping system.[1] This worked by using a low power infrared beam (not a laser) from a distance to detect the sound vibrations in the glass windows.[1][2] Lavrentiy Beria, head of the KGB, had used this Buran device to spy on the U.S., British, and French embassies in Moscow.[2]

On 25 August 2009, U.S. patent 7,580,533 was issued for a device that uses a laser beam and smoke or vapor to detect sound vibrations in free air ("Particulate Flow Detection Microphone based on a laser-photocell pair with a moving stream of smoke or vapor in the laser beam's path"). Sound pressure waves cause disturbances in the smoke that in turn cause variations in the amount of laser light reaching the photo detector. A prototype of the device was demonstrated at the 127th Audio Engineering Society convention in New York City from 9 through 12 October 2009.[3]"

Submission + - The Smithsonian Institution says it owns Space Shuttle Discovery. (space.com)

Submitted by ndsurvivor
ndsurvivor writes: 'The Smithsonian Institution owns the Discovery.' Museum resists Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' plan to move space shuttle to Houston

"This is not a transfer — it's a heist."

A provision in President Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" orders the Air and Space Museum to transfer ownership of Space Shuttle Discovery back to NASA for relocation near the space center in Houston. However, the Smithsonian Institution is not backing down on its stance that Congress has no legal authority to mandate Discovery's removal, and they're bringing the receipts.

While the language of the legislation was altered to comply with Senate reconciliation rules, such as refraining to name Discovery directly, the goal remained the same. The new wording instead refers to the transfer of a "space vehicle" — to be specified by the NASA Administrator within one month of the bill's signing — to a NASA facility "involved in the administration of the Commercial Crew Program" by January 2027. The Smithsonian has rejected the attempt outright, saying it has the paperwork to prove the Institution's ownership of Discovery and that it's critical the space shuttle remains in its care.

Submission + - Trump launching a new private health tracking system with Big Tech's help (apnews.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The Trump administration announced it is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness.

Submission + - Early universe's 'little red dots' may be black hole stars (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It’s as if the baby universe had caught a case of measles. Since NASA’s JWST observatory began peering into the distant universe in 2022, it has discovered a rash of “little red dots”—hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation. Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole.

“I think we’re closing in on an answer,” says Jenny Greene, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. The objects, which some astronomers are calling “black hole stars,” could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. “The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we’ve been playing with before,” says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. “We’re probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn’t know about before,” de Graaff says. Greene agrees: “I can totally imagine that the Milky Way was a little red dot that got its black hole started and then kind of piddled along for the rest of cosmic time.”

If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST—and the kind of discovery astronomers live for. Unraveling the mystery of little red dots has “been the most fun I’ve ever had in my career,” Greene says.

Submission + - Peacock feathers can be lasers (science.org) 2

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom.

Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit “structural color”—nature’s pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity.

After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers’ eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure.

Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn’t mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects—viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps—could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says.

The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. “I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”

Submission + - Apple opens Detroit manufacturing academy (cnbc.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Apple opens manufacturing academy in Detroit as Trump ramps up pressure to invest in U.S.

The Apple Manufacturing Academy will be located in downtown Detroit and will be administered by Michigan State University.

The academy will offer workshops on manufacturing and artificial intelligence to small and medium-sized businesses, Apple said.

Trump has called for Apple to move iPhone production to the U.S. and is implementing tariffs that will likely raise the company's costs.

Submission + - Distorted sound of the early universe suggests we are living in a giant void (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Hubble tension might be due to our location within a large void. That's because the sparse amount of matter in the void would be gravitationally attracted to the more dense matter outside it, continuously flowing out of the void.

In previous research, we showed that this flow would make it look like the local universe is expanding about 10% faster than expected. That would solve the Hubble tension.

Submission + - Nobody owns the moon—researcher suggests that could be a problem (phys.org) 2

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: It's true, nobody owns the moon. But that doesn't mean that anybody can do whatever the heck they want. Taking that argument to the extreme, do we really want some giant corporate logo burned into the regolith for the world to see, so that every time you gaze up into the night sky you're reminded of the existence of some Silicon Valley startup—because, of course, it would be some Silicon Valley startup to pull a stunt like that.

[ Obviously this is relevant too: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.garretthardinsocie... — submitter. ]

Submission + - Cyberattack cripples Russian airline Aeroflot (politico.com)

Submitted by Pravetz-82
Pravetz-82 writes:

A cyberattack on Russian state-owned flagship carrier Aeroflot caused a mass outage to the company’s computer systems on Monday, Russia’s prosecutor’s office said, forcing the airline to cancel more than 100 flights and delay others. Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow and Belarusian hacker activist group the Belarus Cyber-Partisans, which opposes the rule of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.

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With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?

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