Thursday Things: Rogue Planet Edition
27 August 2020. Vol 2 No 35 By Dan McGirt. #55
Welcome to Thursday Things! We’ve got planets gone wild, a mammoth undertaking, cute robots, and more!
Planet party on the party planet! Photo by David Menidrey on Unsplash
Space Could Be Filled With Hidden 'Rogue' Planets - And We May Soon Be Able to See Them
Hidden among the seeming endlessness of space, there could be countless worlds that never see the light of day. These mysterious bodies, called rogue planets, are not like other planets, although there could be multitudes of them.
In our own Solar System, Earth and all its planetary siblings orbit around the Sun, bathing in its warmth and light. Rogue planets, on the other hand, are unbound to any star – they simply drift alone through empty space, belonging to nothing except the darkness.
I saw this movie. It was called Flash Gordon. The planet was Mongo, ruled by Ming the Merciless. Apparently, it was all true.
While we’re on the subject, this is the 40th Anniversary of the 1980 Flash Gordon film. It is utterly cheesy fun — and, as noted above, based (loosely…) on real science, because rogue planets are real. It also has the greatest movie soundtrack of all time, by Queen. Flash! Ah-ahhhhhhhhhhh!
If the rogue planets don’t get us, scientists here on Earth will ensure that we are overrun by dinosaurs, sabretooth tigers, giant dire wolves, and woolly mammoths, will they? Scientists Briefly Reactivated the Cells of a 28,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth
Scientists take a mammoth step forward by reactivating the cells of an extinct animal who died almost thirty thousand years ago, but that doesn’t mean you should expect to see one stomping around at your local zoo any time soon.
Sometime, roughly around 28,000 BCE, a young female woolly mammoth died along the Dmitry Laptev Strait in Russia’s far east. The creature’s body was trapped in the Siberian permafrost, preserving the corpse for generations as the rest of her species disappeared from the land above. She sat entombed in ice for millennia. Then, she was unearthed by researchers in 2010. And they just woke up some of her cells for a brief moment.
Do you have an Amazon account? Odds are, you do. Did you know that you have a public profile page on Amazon, kind of a low-rent Facebook page? Neither did I! In this article, Kim Komando tells you about it and also give instructions on how to nail down the privacy settings so you aren’t sharing more with the world about your Amazon activity than you intended.
You may not realize that as an Amazon customer, you also have a profile visible to other Amazon users.
Your public profile is created automatically, whether you want it or not, and it contains your comments and any ratings that you have left on products purchased on the site. If you reviewed any food delivered through Amazon Restaurants, those reviews are also visible even though they shut down this service last year.
Your biographical information and other site interactions are also posted to your profile. Thankfully, your public profile doesn’t include your purchases or browsing history, but it’s still very informative.
To control what is visible on your public profile, follow these steps:
Obviously, go read the article to get the steps for securing your Amazon public profile.
What does the methanol-powered beetle bot — it’s name is RoBeetle! — do exactly? It doesn’t matter! It’s so cute! I need one! Beyond batteries: Scientists build methanol-powered beetle bot
A team at the University of Southern California has now made a breakthrough, building an 88-milligram (one three hundredth of an ounce) "RoBeetle" that runs on methanol and uses an artificial muscle system to crawl, climb and carry loads on its back for up to two hours.
It is just 15 millimeters (.6 inches) in length, making it "one of the lightest and smallest autonomous robots ever created," its inventor Xiufeng Yang told AFP.
"We wanted to create a robot that has a weight and size comparable to real insects," added Yang, who was lead author of a paper describing the work in Science Robotics on Wednesday.
I’ll beetle your friend forever
Thanks for reading Thursday Things! I’ll see you next Thursday!
