Watch moon impact live: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PRp...

AICO Falcon9 Lunar Impact Livestream_Aug 5 2026

YouTube video by YorkUObservatory

youtube.com

The fatal Hendra virus was an infamous spillover from bats to horses to humans in Australia in the 1990s. Since then, ecologists, bat experts and virologists have learned a lot about these events, perhaps including mitigating strategies. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

A mystery virus started killing horses. Then humans. Was this the moment our coronavirus era began?

In the 1990s, scientists in Australia began searching for the origins of a new disease showing up in places hundreds of kilometres apart. They discovered the origin: bats. And found a way to reduce th...

theguardian.com

“All previous identifications of asteroids with a neck have been interpreted as ‘bilobates’, having just two lobes, but (44) Nysa has a unique ‘trilobate’ structure.” www.eso.org/public/video...

Unmasking an unusual asteroid

Unmasking an unusual asteroid

eso.org

Clarkesworld has recently discovered that their August issue successfully breached containment and gained access to the Internet, where it is presently hacking reader's minds. "Oh no, what will we do? Who knew that stories could be so powerful?" said Neil Clarke, when approached for comment.

Clarkesworld@clarkesworldmagazine.com · 4d ago

The August issue of Clarkesworld is now online and features stories by Ravn J. Silver, Eilis O’Neal, Jordan Alexander, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, E.N. Auslender, Y.M. Pang, and H.H. Pak. clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_239 Subscribe today at: clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/

I quite like “Sugar” but honestly they could have just made him a quirky cinephile detective with some other secret than [redacted as might still be a spoiler for some people], which is completely ridiculous and has no effect on 90% of what happens.

1/3 How do you feel about living in a world full of rude robots that have been trained to navigate from watching first person shooter games and to treat you as an NPC (non player character)? [Admittedly, in such a game it is better to be an NPC...] I asked Gemini about this new set of startups:

Nobody even glanced at the slop before sending it in. No one saw the left arrow turning in itself and thought "mmm", wondered why Cote d'Ivoire has no coast. They are not simply incompetent, they don't care at all, probably because they know every sentence they ever say is a lie anyway

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 6d ago

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a ⁠global conference www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

When setting a default name for the PDFs your customers download for their records, maybe try to find a Goldilocks zone between Mercury ("getPDF.pdf" for every file) and the Oort Cloud ([64 hex digits guaranteed unique across the universe, and utterly meaningless to humans].pdf)

This is a great account of the perils of trying to reach statistical conclusions from scans of old astronomical photographic plates, when the noise and artifacts in the data turns out to be very far from uniformly distributed. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...

Did aliens put satellites into Earth's orbit pre-Sputnik? - Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe | iHeart

<p>Daniel and Kelly dissect the evidence presented in recent peer-reviewed science papers for pre-Sputnik artificial satellites in Earth orbit.</p><p>See <a href='https://omnystudio.com/listener'>omny...

iheart.com

I liked the coinage “veer” in Don DeLillo’s *Zero K* for an elevator that moves sideways.

The mission to rescue the Swift Observatory is experiencing technical problems. They may be solvable, but it's a nail-biter. Unclear if the observatory will survive. 🧪🔭 arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

Corey S. Powell@coreyspowell.bsky.social · last mo.

NASA & Katalyst Space are attempting to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a powerful gamma-ray telescope that's on a death-spiral toward Earth. A booster spacecraft, called Link, is now on its way. It will attempt to grab Swift & lift it to safety. 🧪🔭 spacenews.com/pegasus-laun...

Tickets are open for Astronomy Open Night at Macquarie! Come along to look through our telescopes and see lots of cool talks and experiments! event.mq.edu.au/astronomy-op...

Home Office used ‘AI hallucinated’ information to refuse asylum claim, judge suggests

Home Office used ‘AI hallucinated’ information to refuse asylum claim, judge suggests

Upper tribunal unable to find document cited in case and claims it is ‘analogous to relying on bogus evidence’ * UK politics live – latest updates A senior judge has accused the Home Office of relying on “AI hallucinated” information to refuse an asylum claim. The case relates to a Moroccan woman and her child who fled her country after experiencing forced underage marriage and extreme violence, including rape. The woman claimed asylum on the basis of fears that she would be killed by her husband: a powerful, previously convicted criminal. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

After recent observations with the VLT: “While there was evidence for the existence of this companion star, including a possible direct detection with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaiʻi, USA, this is the strongest evidence for, and clearest image yet of, Betelgeuse B.” www.eso.org/public/news/...

no we aren't. no it isn't. that isn't true

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.

My new startup, ByteShower, plans to install miniature data centres in the hot water systems of a million households by 2030. And not only will we pay all your water and electricity bills, we’ll upgrade your internet to a high-capacity fibre connection. Win-win!

In 1909, Arthur Wieferich proved that if 𝑥ᵖ+𝑦ᵖ=𝑧ᵖ for an odd prime 𝑝 that does not divide positive integers 𝑥, 𝑦, or 𝑧, then 𝑝² must divide 2ᵖ⁻¹−1 Fermat’s little theorem says 𝑝 itself always divides 2ᵖ⁻¹−1.

Here 🧵⤵️ is an attempt at slightly expanding what the super simple description of the counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture means, originally written in reply to @tucek.bsky.social on the Musky place. I assume knowledge of what projective space and homogeneous coordinates are. •1/12

Gro-Tsen@gro-tsen.bsky.social · 2w ago

Now this is, like, SUPER EMBARRASSING for anyone who studied the Jacobian conjecture. 🤣 The counterexample written with an explicit formula looked messy, but for any algebraic geometrist this description 🔽 is hilariously simple. This is in “HOW did we miss this” territory?

You always discover something when you have a new instrument with higher sensitivity - Mahapatra+ on Planet-wide, Concentric Density Waves in Venus’s Upper Atmosphere Revealed through Polarimetry? in which you can see a bullseye on the day-lit side of our sister planet! #exoplanets #astrodon

If you’re in the mood for a cheerful podcast on the elaborate mating dances and other prodigious sexual habits of (certain species of) flies: www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Flies are probably better at foreplay than you are - ABC listen

Flies have rhythm and choreography, could their moves make the next TikTok dance fad? Dune flies groove to their own beat in dance-circles and hoverflies use rhythmic movements in mating. Researcher...

abc.net.au

The Jacobian conjecture is false! The Jacobian conjecture proposed that if you have a map F:C^n→C^n with polynomials as the components, and the determinant of the matrix of partial derivatives of F is a non-zero constant, then F will have a polynomial inverse.

A cautionary note for those seeking a shortcut to publication--from a very authoritative source.🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...

science.org

Waymo is not a taxi service. It is an experiment. After driving me to my door at home many times, tonight it insisted on dropping me on another street. Customer service told me the road was blocked and that it was an easy walk home. There was no blockage, and it is one of the steepest hills in SF.

Anything meant to stick to human skin should be rated by its ability to cope with the existence of body hair, on a scale from: 0 for Band-Aid Aquablock: What! You put me on your *calf*? All I can do is fall to the ground. to: 8 for Leukosilk: Ah, mildly hirsute here, no problemo!

Nolan fans admit to selling kidneys to pay for eye surgery to allow them to perceive the Imax 1570 version of “The Odyssey” with the full acuity the director would have wanted. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ju...

Christopher Nolan fans are embarking on epic journeys to see The Odyssey the way he wants them to

Cinephiles are crossing oceans to see the film at its highest possible resolution – and only 41 cinemas in the world are equipped to do it

theguardian.com

The math has been around for decades - but nobody noticed it gives a new framework for quantum mechanics from which the Standard Model gauge group and its representation on one generation of quarks and leptons falls out pretty naturally. arxiv.org/abs/2607.10833

An interesting interview with former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist who was involved in the negotiations leading to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. His Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi, had studied at MIT when Moniz was on the faculty, and though they hadn’t met at the

In a novel, you can telegraph the importance of an apparently minor character in various subtle ways — the name you give them, some aspect of their appearance, a few words they speak — but there is no real equivalent to a (post-Better-Call-Saul) TV show casting the actor who played Lalo Salamanca.

How far can something proceed when it cannot deliver on its promises because of basic physics? With the disconnect between funding and profit in tech it’s hard to say.

Prof. Sam Lawler@sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 4w ago

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK NOOOOO https://ca.pcmag.com/news/16760/fcc-approves-reflect-orbitals-giant-mirror-satellite-that-astronomers-hate