Hurricane Beryl made landfall near the coastal town of Matagorda in Texas early Monday, pounding coastal areas with dangerous storm surges, strong winds and heavy rain as it moved inland, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

Prosecutors in Bob Menendez's corruption trial are expected to kick off their closing arguments Monday, after more than seven weeks of testimony over allegations the once-powerful senator accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes.

A challenge to a Biden administration rule allowing socially conscious investing by employee retirement plans will present an early test of how courts will scrutinize federal regulations after the U.S. Supreme Court said they no longer have to defer to the expertise of the...

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Monday he would go to Washington after discussing a Chinese peace plan for Ukraine in Beijing.

A 2017 satellite photo captured three hurricanes — Katia, Irma and Jose — in a near-perfect line across "hurricane alley" in the Atlantic Ocean. Interestingly, the storms, which are named alphabetically, appeared to be in the wrong order.

Moving large amounts of regolith is a requirement for any long-term mission to the Moon or Mars. But so far, humanity has only sent systems capable of moving small amounts of soil at a time – primarily for sample collection. Sending a large, dedicated excavator to perform such work might be cost-prohibitive due to its weight, so why not send a bulldozer attachment to a mobility unit already planned for use on the surface? That was the thought process of an interdisciplinary team of engineers from NASA and the Colorado School of Mines. They came up with the Lunar Attachment Node for Construction and Excavation – or LANCE. LANCE is an attachment to NASA’s Chariot rover prototype, which was originally designed to be the primary mobility system for astronauts returning to the Moon. However, it was designed in 2007, when the original NASA Lunar Architecture plan was to establish a permanent lunar base in 2019.  That still has yet to happen, and the Chariot system has recently been replaced by two separate rovers for use in the Artemis missions – one pressurized for longer exploratory trips and one unpressurized for short jaunts around the Artemis base site. However, the concept of LANCE should be adaptable to whatever method NASA finally uses to transport humans on the lunar surface.  Fraser discusses the architecture plans for Artemis. While LANCE looks like a simple bulldozer blade, its design is made specifically for use on the lunar surface. Its frame is aluminum rather than steel, a nod to the weight restrictions on space missions. Its curved front end, called a moldboard in excavation terms, is made of a combination of carbon fiber composites and epoxy, which were even more rarely used back in 2009 when the system was initially proposed. Engineers even produced a prototype after extensive Finite Element Analysis modeling of the expected forces on the blade during several types of actions, such as building roads, landing pads, and berms that could block debris scatter from affecting surrounding equipment during rocket landings and ascents. The prototype was tested at a natural test site in Moses Lake, Washington. Moses Lake proved an ideal training ground for lunar excavation equipment because of a highly cohesive silt deposited by the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980. The silt proved similar to lunar regolith, but without the requirement to move thousands of tons of simulated regolith to a NASA lab somewhere. So, NASA has been using the site as a test bed for large-scale lunar excavations for years. Fraser shows plans for the landing and ascent vehicles on the lunar surface. LANCE performed admirably well during its test phase. It leveled a 25m x 25m area, then moved on to some berm construction. As part of the testing, it quickly became apparent that operator efficiency made a massive difference in how quickly these operations were performed, so whoever ends up using the implement on the lunar surface would benefit from sufficient training beforehand. But if it ever does end up operational on the Lunar surface, LANCE will have to contend with a very different environment than it did at Moses Lake. Lunar regolith is much more electrostatically charged than volcanic silt, and the lower gravity could make the forces of moving it much more difficult, despite the best modeling efforts of LANCE’s design team.  It is unclear if LANCE will indeed be part of the Artemis missions, though large-scale excavation equipment will be needed as part of the mission architecture. What will remain to be seen is whether LANCE’s development and testing show that it should be possible to utilize a lightweight, flexible attachment to a rover to help build the infrastructure necessary to support a long-term base on the lunar surface. Learn More:Mueller et al. – Lightweight bulldozer attachment for construction and excavation on the lunar surfaceUT – NASA Wants to Build Landing Pads on the MoonUT – What’s the Best Way to Build Landing Pads on the Moon?UT – Want to Build Structures on the Moon? Just Blast the Regolith With Microwaves Lead Image:Chariot rover with LANCE attachment undergoing testing at the Moses Lake test site.Credit – Mueller et al. The post A Handy Attachment Could Make Lunar Construction a Breeze appeared first on Universe Today.

I must confess, I think asteroids and I think of movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon! Scientists think that an asteroid like the ones that appeared in the Hollywood blockbusters struck Mexico 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. It now seems they may not have been the only ones that were wiped from our planet. Ammonites are marine mollusks that flourished for 350 million years but they were wiped out too. Some research suggests they were struggling in North America but thriving in other parts of the world.  Ammonites lived during the Mesozoic era and are related to modern day squids and octopuses. They had coiled spiral shells that were divided into chambers which were used to regulate buoyancy and their movement through the sea. Their fossil remains have been found across the planet on beaches up and down coast lines. The shells somewhat resemble the Fibonacci sequence (where consecutive numbers are added to produce the next; 0 and 1 becomes 1, then 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on) and it is this in part that has fascinated palaeontologists about the creature.  Along with the dinosaurs, the ammonites were wiped from Earth 66 million years ago when a massive asteroid struck the Earth near what we now call the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico creating the stunning feature; the Chicxulub crater. It’s not just the dinosaurs and ammonites that are thought to have been taken to extinction but a total of 75% of all species are thought to have vanished from Earth in the cataclysmic event. It is thought the asteroid that struck Earth was 10 kilometres in diameter and released energy equivalent to billions of atomic bombs.  Chicxulub crater in Mexico. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA Palaeontologists have argued that the ammonites were already declining and that their extinction was unavoidable around the end of the Cretaceous period but new research published in Nature Communications shows that they may not have been so close to extinction after all. The paper by lead author Dr Joseph Flannery-Sutherland and team from Bristol University reveal that the evolution of the ammonites ahead of the asteroid impact was really quite complex.  Using fossils alone to unravel the way a species like ammonites changed over time is difficult. According to Dr Flannery-Sutherland ‘The fossil record tells us some of the story, but it is often an unreliable narrator. Patterns of diversity can just reflect patterns of sampling, essentially where and when we have found new fossil species, rather than actual biological history.’ He goes on to explain that by analysing just the late cretaceous ammonite fossil record as though it was the full story is why the wrong conclusion has previously been drawn. It is more complex.  The team created a new database of all fossils collected to date, using museum collections, university samples and any specimens available rather than just rely on previously published papers. This helped the team to build a more complete picture from source data.  The database allowed the team to understand how ammonite extinction rates and speciation rates (how quickly a species gives rise to new species) varied across the world. If extinction was underway during the late cretaceous period then extinction rates would be greater than their speciation rates everywhere. Instead, across a wide range of geographies, the extinction and speciation rates varied considerably. Possible causes for the variation may have been merely environmental factors like ocean temperatures and sea level to predators and competition among ammonites themselves. Source : Ammonites’ fate sealed by meteor strike that wiped out dinosaurs The post Ammonites Were Doing Fine Until the Asteroid Hit appeared first on Universe Today.

Gerry Rafferty collaborator co-wrote “Stuck in the Middle With You.” Continue reading…

We're now in uncharted, historic waters: President Biden — backed by first lady Jill Biden and his convicted son, Hunter, who's serving as de facto gatekeeper for longtime friends — says that nothing, besides an act of God, will persuade him to quit his re-election campaign, Mike and Jim write in a Behind the Curtain column. But outside Biden's protective bubble, a fast-growing number of Democrats are praying for —and plotting — a more earthly intervention. They want...

Russia’s outsized military spending continues to blunt the impact of economic sanctions during its war in Ukraine. The World Bank said that it was upgrading the country’s economic standing to its top-tier “high-income” category from its earlier “upper-middle-income” status, because its gross national income (GNI) per capita increased by 11.2% in the last year. “Economic activity in Russia was influenced by a large increase in military related activity in 2023, while...