The first asteroid sample collected in space by a U.S. spacecraft and brought to Earth is unveiled to the world at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Wednesday, Oct. 11.

The science team from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) mission will provide results from an initial analysis of the sample, which landed on Sunday, Sept. 24, in the Utah desert. News conference participants include:

• NASA Administrator Bill Nelson

• Lori Glaze, NASA Planetary Directorate Science Division Director

• Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, University of Arizona, Tucson

• Francis McCubbin, OSIRIS-REx Head Astromaterials curator, NASA Johnson

• Daniel Glavin, OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt

Scientists worldwide will study the bits of asteroid to gather clues about the origin of the solar system and how life may have begun on Earth.

Watch the moment OSIRIS-REx collected the sample in 2020: https://youtu.be/xj0O-fLSV7c

Found this a bit of an interesting rabbit hole. Archive link: https://archive.ph/NHCjE

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-names-new-head-of-technology-policy-strategy/

Charity Weeden will serve as associate administrator for the agency’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy

A schematic depiction according to genetic studies by Alena Kushniarevich

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135820

https://archive.ph/FqyKx

Who would've thought

This will be an annular eclipse, meaning the moon will be too distant from Earth to fully block out the sun. Instead, the moon will block out 90.7% of the sun's disk from the perspective of those along the path of greatest eclipse, the yellow path on the above map. The remaining 9.3% of the sun's disk will be visible around the moon in an annulus shape- a ring of non-zero thickness. Hence why it's called an annular eclipse.

Outside of the path of greatest eclipse, the vast majority of both American continents will see at least a partial eclipse. You can use the orange paths to estimate maximum solar obscuration from your area. The time of maximum eclipse is at 1:59pm EDT.

Remember not to ever look directly at the sun without proper eye protection, not even during an eclipse! In the absence of proper protection, the best way to observe the eclipse is to watch the shadows left on the ground by leaves on a tree. You'll see many small projections corresponding to the uncovered area of the sun. Along the path of greatest eclipse at the time of maximum obscuration, you'll see rings. Otherwise, you'll see crescents.

there's a ton of useful information for building a homebrew muon detector in this video wow! a similar project for detecting gamma rays provides a starting point for building a bill of materials to replicate the work in the video.

it would be fun to try to replicate this on a shoestring budget.

In the current study, the researchers conducted five experiments in which they measured or induced a sense of scarcity in participants, and examined how the choices people made changed depending on whether that scarcity was related to a shorter- or longer-term need.

Overall, they found that when people feel that they don't have enough resources to meet an immediate need, such as food or shelter, they are more likely to make decisions that offer an immediate payout, even if it comes at the expense of receiving a larger payout later. But when scarcity threatens a longer-term need, such as replacing a run-down car, people experiencing scarcity are no less willing to wait for larger, later rewards—and in some cases are more willing to wait—compared with people not experiencing scarcity.

Wait poors are human beings?????

The article explains it well, but for the uninitiated, the so-called Hubble Tension has been one of the major questions in cosmology for the past several decades. The Webb telescope has so far corroborated Hubble’s results, which deepens the problem as there is now very little chance that it is an error in measurement rather than of theory.