EverythingScience

Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in A yottameter is a one followed by 24 zeroes. But even the mighty yotta is not enough to handle the world's voracious appetite for data, according to Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK's National Physical Laboratory. "In terms of expressing data in yottabytes, which is the highest prefix currently, we're very close to the limit," Brown told AFP. Article @EverythingScience

NASA Awards SpaceX Second Contract Option for Artemis Moon Landing “Returning astronauts to the Moon to learn, live, and work is a bold endeavor. With multiple planned landers, from SpaceX and future partners, NASA will be better positioned to accomplish the missions of tomorrow: conducting more science on the surface of the Moon than ever before and preparing for crewed missions to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Continuing our collaborative efforts with SpaceX through Option B furthers our resilient plans for regular crewed transportation to the lunar surface and establishing a long-term human presence under Artemis,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager for the Human Landing System. Article @EverythingScience

The Oldest Evidence of Ancient Humans Cooking With Fire Was Just Found Article @EverythingScience

Solving brain dynamics gives rise to flexible machine-learning models Last year, MIT researchers announced that they had built "liquid" neural networks, inspired by the brains of small species: a class of flexible, robust machine learning models that learn on the job and can adapt to changing conditions, for real-world safety-critical tasks, like driving and flying. The flexibility of these "liquid" neural nets meant boosting the bloodline to our connected world, yielding better decision-making for many tasks involving time-series data, such as brain and heart monitoring, weather forecasting, and stock pricing. But these models become computationally expensive as their number of neurons and synapses increase and require clunky computer programs to solve their underlying, complicated math. And all of this math, similar to many physical phenomena, becomes harder to solve with size, meaning computing lots of small steps to arrive at a solution. Now, the same team of scientists has discovered a way to alleviate this bottleneck... Article @EverythingScience

Engineers solve a mystery on the path to smaller, lighter batteries A discovery by MIT researchers could finally unlock the door to the design of a new kind of rechargeable lithium battery that is more lightweight, compact, and safe than current versions, and that has been pursued by labs around the world for years. The key to this potential leap in battery technology is replacing the liquid electrolyte that sits between the positive and negative electrodes with a much thinner, lighter layer of solid ceramic material, and replacing one of the electrodes with solid lithium metal. This would greatly reduce the overall size and weight of the battery and remove the safety risk associated with liquid electrolytes, which are flammable. But that quest has been beset with one big problem: dendrites. Article @EverythingScience

Wormholes May Already Have Been Detected, Physicists Say Hypothetical bridges connecting distant regions of space (and time) could more or less look like garden variety black holes, meaning it's possible these mythical beasts of physics have already been seen. Thankfully however, if a new model proposed by a small team of physicists from Sofia University in Bulgaria is accurate, there could still be a way to tell them apart. Article @EverythingScience

Cosmic chocolate pralines? General neutron star structure revealed The study of the sound speed has revealed that heavy neutron stars have a stiff mantle and a soft core, while light neutron stars have a soft mantle and a stiff core—much like different chocolate pralines. Article @EverythingScience

NASA's Webb catches fiery hourglass as new star forms Article #Webb @EverythingScience

Earth at 8 billion: Consumption not crowd is key to climate Article @EverythingScience