The national tragedy of more drug overdose deaths‚ suicides‚ and homicides won’t be solved “if we have to look at each other through the prism of race‚” activist Bob Woodson says. “There are people…

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Katelyn McGraw is currently incarcerated in Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Kenosha‚ Wisconsin‚ serving a sentence for possession of narcotic drugs and bail jumping.…

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Roman Catholic church officials have reportedly helped ease tensions between two drug cartels who have caused havoc in southern Mexico‚ according to the Associated Press (AP).Unspecified clergymen began…

An amendment to an Indiana bill would allow an unelected‚ Democrat-stacked committee that works in secret to control whom Hoosiers are allowed to vote for as state attorney general. The amendment would…

Germany plans to enable underground carbon storage at offshore sites to combat climate change‚ according to the country's vice chancellor‚ Robert Habeck.The country‚ which is home to many energy-intensive…

There is perhaps no better example of our country’s two-tier justice system than the White House’s constant covering for its resident serial assailant‚ Commander Biden. According to recently obtained…

Like many of you‚ I love a good meteor shower. I have fond memories of the Leonid meteor storm back in 1999 when several hundred per hour were seen at peak. Sadly meteor storms are not that common unlike meteor showers of which‚ there are about 20 major showers per year. Wait‚ there’s another one and this time it comes from the debris left behind from Comet 46P/Wirtanen with an expected peak on December 12. Last year‚ 23 meteors were seen on that night that matched the location of the comets trail.  Comets (and some asteroids) leave a trail of debris behind them like a trail of celestial breadcrumbs. If the orbit of a comet crosses the orbit of the Earth then the particles from the debris (that are often no larger than grains of sand) collide with our atmosphere. At the immense speeds (of the order of 60 km per second‚ the particles falling through the atmosphere cause the gas to glow giving rise to the classic shooting star we see in the sky. Because the orbits of Earth and comets are relatively fixed‚ this process repeats itself every time we go through the same part of the orbit giving us the familiar annual meteor showers.  One such comet that it seems may become host to a new annual shower is Comet 46P/Wirtanen (46P). It nearly hit the headlines previously when it had been initially selected as the target for the Rosetta mission which‚ as you may recall‚ visited 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko instead.  46P is known as a short period comet taking 5.4 years to complete one orbit of the Sun. It is among the family of comets known as a Jupiter comet which has a most distant point from the Sun of between 5 and 6 astronomical units (1 AU is the average distance between the Sun and Earth). Observations have suggested it has a diameter of about 1.4km.  Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Rosetta mission (Credit – NASA) Due to the high levels of ice present in comets‚ it’s not unusual for active areas on their surface to appear as the ices sublimate into gasses or pockets of gas escape. Observations using the TRAPPIST telescope (The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope) suggest 40% of the surface is active which is higher than the usual 5-10% for Jupiter family comets. A recent study found the presence of mm sized dust particles in the comet’s coma which should be visible upon entering Earth’s atmosphere.  The orbit of 46P has a very low minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) to Earth of just 0.071AU. The MOID between two objects that orbit a common point is the distance between the closest points of their orbits. The low MOID and the mm sized particles mean there is a high liklihood it could be the source of a meteor shower. Previous observations however have revealed no positive confirmation of peaks in 2017 and 2019. During the 2017 and 2019 predictions‚ it seems the low velocity of the particles coupled with the radiant (the point of apparent origin of the shower) below the horizon suggest that visibility may have been severely limited. The radiant of this predicted shower is in the constellation Sculptor and the shower has been dubbed the Lambda Sculptorids.  The prediction for the 2023 shower‚ which predicted an encounter from a stream of debris from an outburst in 1974‚ suggested an outburst of meteors on December 12 between 12:08 and 20:06. A further outburst was predicted between 17:05 and 06:26 on December 13.  The team who presented their findings in Astronomy and Astrophysics reported meteor activity as predicted and detected 23 meteors from the new shower on the night of December 12 2023. The team are now looking at the models to see what we might expect to see this year and whether Lamba Sculptorids need to be added to our list of annual meteor showers.  Source : Observations of the new meteor shower from comet 46P/Wirtanen The post Astronomers Discover a New Meteor Shower. The Source is Comet 46P/Wirtanen appeared first on Universe Today.

The guitar hero has followed a very unique orbit since leaving striking out on his own. Continue reading…

Futurists of the past used to imagine that breakthroughs in technology and science could create a utopian world fueled by boundless clean energy. Now‚ an artificial intelligence model from researchers at Princeton may have proven them right. Or at least‚ it’s gotten us a step closer. Fusion – the nuclear reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei combine and form new nuclei and subatomic particles – has long been the dream as an energy source: it’s non-polluting‚ safe‚ and virtually limitless‚ producing nearly four million times as much energy by mass as burning fossil fuels.Unfortunately‚ there’s a problem. Fusion is really‚ really hard to do: it requires the kinds of temperatures and pressures that are found in the hearts of stars. Since we can’t really get those exact conditions in a lab on Earth‚ the relatively few examples of human-created fusion have relied on a workaround: normal terrestrial pressure‚ and temperatures more than ten times that of the Sun’s core.At those temperatures‚ the fuel needed for the reaction can’t exist in a solid or liquid state‚ and it’s not even in there as a gas – it’s plasma. Therein lies another problem: this state of matter is so energetic and superheated that it’s easy for the fuel to “tear” – to lose stability and escape the magnetic fields keeping it within the reactor – thus putting an end to any fusion within milliseconds.It’s precisely this problem that the Princeton team claims to have solved. “Previous studies have generally focused on either suppressing or mitigating the effects of these tearing instabilities after they occur in the plasma‚” explained first author of the new paper Jaemin Seo‚ now an assistant professor of physics at Chung-Ang University in South Korea‚ in a statement. “But our approach allows us to predict and avoid those instabilities before they ever appear.”Their answer: an artificial intelligence (AI) trained on previous experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. “By learning from past experiments‚ rather than incorporating information from physics-based models‚ the AI could develop a final control policy that supported a stable‚ high-powered plasma regime in real time‚ at a real reactor‚” said research leader Egemen Kolemen‚ associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).Like any AI model‚ it doesn’t really understand what it’s doing on a deep level – but it doesn’t need to. The team fed the program data about real-time plasma characteristics from previous experiments and set it the challenge of predicting – and‚ crucially‚ avoiding – tearing instabilities.“We don’t teach the reinforcement learning model all of the complex physics of a fusion reaction‚” explained Azarakhsh Jalalvand‚ a research scholar in Kolemen’s lab and coauthor of the paper. “We tell it what the goal is – to maintain a high-powered reaction – what to avoid – a tearing mode instability – and the knobs it can turn to achieve those outcomes. Over time‚ it learns the optimal pathway for achieving the goal of high power while avoiding the punishment of an instability.”After myriad simulations‚ which were able to be tweaked and refined by human observers‚ the team tried the AI out for real at the D-III D facility. The model proved itself capable of predicting tearing instabilities up to 300 milliseconds in advance – not much to a human‚ but plenty of time for the AI to act‚ changing parameters such as the shape of the plasma or the strength of the beams inputting power to the reaction in order to keep the plasma stable.So is unlimited clean energy just around the corner? Not quite. Plasma instability is far from the only problem with fusion – and tearing is only one type of possible plasma instability. But what the paper does show‚ the team says‚ is a pretty good proof of concept: “We have strong evidence that the controller works quite well at DIII-D‚ but we need more data to show that it can work in a number of different situations‚” Seo said. “We want to work toward something more universal.”The paper is published in the journal Nature.