February 19, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

 

NASA - Perseverance

We Can Perfectly Execute A Landing On Mars... 

The folks at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory did their usual next-level shit on Thursday. Throwing a dart 128 million miles and hitting the bullseye is really worth celebrating. The new Mars rover Perseverance did exactly what it was supposed to do. It landed, softly, in the Jezero Crater, which is probably an ancient river delta and now, for the next two years, it will look for fossilized pond scum, which would be the most important pond scum in the history of pond scum, which goes back to the beginning of time, both here and there.

It’s hard to explain to people too young to have lived through it what it was like when what was then called The Space Race was going on. It wasn’t just the astronauts, although they certainly commanded the stage...The machines always took the back seat to men, but the machines were our eyes in so many distant, wonderful places. We often need prompting to lift our eyes to the sky, but we almost never regret it when we do.

 

...But Can't Keep the Lights on in Texas

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts — but lasted days for millions of Texans — occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid.

The painful decision to implement rolling blackouts saved Texas (and the country) from an even more significant disaster. 

A Song of Fire and Ice

An analysis of Department of Energy data published in September found weather-related power outages are up by 67% since 2000. Climate change is expected to continue fueling hotter heatwaves, more bitter winter storms and more ferocious hurricanes in the coming decades. As both California and Texas have discovered in recent years, power plants, generators and electrical lines are not designed to withstand the catastrophes to come. And all the while, the fossil fuels that both states rely on to power these faulty systems are driving the climate crisis, and hastening infrastructural collapse.

“We’re already seeing the effects of climate change,” said Sascha von Meier, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “There will be more of this and it will get worse.”

 

 Dogs Have Body Awareness 

Animal intelligence has always been determined with an human bias.  Even as that bias has been diminished, dogs were always consigned to an intelligence below that of a variety of species that passes the "mirror test".

Great apes, elephants, dolphins, corvid birds and a "constantly growing list" of species pass this test, said senior author Péter Pongrácz, an associate professor in the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. But dogs had not.

Scientists lost interest in studying species that didn't show these complex forms of self-representation, Pongrácz said. But in the new study, he and his team decided to take a "bottom-up approach" and investigate whether dogs show a lower level of self-representation — one that would be ecologically relevant to them.

"Dogs are intelligent, large-bodied, fast-moving creatures that move in a complex environment," Pongrácz told Live Science. "Therefore, body awareness would be theoretically important for them when negotiating various obstacles, for example."

 

A Bridge Built of Sponges 

SEAS

Marine sponges like the Venus’ flower basket (Euplectella aspergillum) look like an otherworldly creature one would expect to find on an alien planet. These glassy sponges resemble vases or sculptures but don’t let their fragile appearance fool you — their skeleton is extremely strong. In fact, the structure is so strong that engineers are now mimicking it for the next generation of stronger and taller buildings, longer bridges, and lighter spacecraft.In their new study, which was published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) analyzed the skeletal structure of Venus’ flower basket.

Similar to today’s tall skyscrapers or bridges, the sponge’s skeleton is arranged in a diagonally-reinforced square lattice-like structure. However, the lattice has an even higher strength-to-weight ratio than traditional lattice designs employed for centuries in architecture and engineering.